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Arson Plus and Other Stories

Collected Case Files of the Continental Op

The Early Years, Vol. 1

Dashiell Hammett

Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Contents

Foreword: “Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

Introduction: The Early Years, 1923–1924

“Arson Plus”

“Crooked Souls”

“Slippery Fingers”

About the Author

FOREWORD

“Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

The Continental Op: The Complete Case Files is the first electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett’s collected Continental Op stories to be licensed by either Hammett or his estate—and the first English-language volume of any kind to include all twenty-eight of the Op’s standalone stories. But, as with most of Hammett’s publishing history, the saga of the case-hardened, inelegant, unnamed operative from the Continental Detective Agency is anything but straightforward. The players in the Op’s publishing-life drama are several—including Hammett; his paramour and executrix, Lillian Hellman; Hellman’s allies; Hammett’s family; and various publishing advocates and political adversaries. Add to that the relative novelty of electronic books. Hammett’s 1920s publishing contracts did not anticipate his “little fat detective” on the luminous, ephemeral pages so lately familiar to modern readers. And yet, the Op was the product of an era of tumult, who survived gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, and neglect. He’s learned to adapt.

The Op stories were published individually during the early years of Hammett’s writing career, between 1923 and 1930. All but two were featured in Black Mask, the leading light of pulp magazines—a favorite among working-class readers, crime-fiction aficionados, and anyone who longed for a coin’s worth of well-crafted thrills. In June of 1929, near the end of the run, Hammett sent a note to Harry Block, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He had just sent Block a draft of his third novel, The Maltese Falcon, which he described as “by far the best thing” he’d done so far.

Also I’ve about two hundred and fifty thousand words of short stories in which the Continental Op appears. I know you’re not likely to be wildly enthusiastic about the short-story idea; but don’t you think that something quite profitable for both of us could be done with them by making a quite bulky collection of them—selling them by the pound, as it were? I don’t know anything about the manufacturing costs—how far bulkiness could be carried at a fairly low cost without eating up the profits. I’d want to rewrite the stories we included, of course, and there are possibly fifty or sixty of the quarter-million that I’d throw out as not worth bothering about. In the remainder there are some good stories, and altogether I think they’d give a more complete and true picture of a detective at work than has been given anywhere else.

Almost immediately Hammett had second thoughts about republishing the Op tales. “I’d rather forget them,” he told Block. The hardboiled pioneer was ready, in contemporary lexis, to retool his brand—to abandon the constraints and expectations of the crime-fiction genre and to shift his focus from the Continental Detective Agency’s anonymous foot soldier to more sophisticated conflicts starring independent detectives, non-detectives, and ex-detectives. It wasn’t long before the Continental Op’s work-a-day exploits were overshadowed by the deeper, darker, and splashier successes of Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, 1930), Ned Beaumont (The Glass Key, 1931), and Nick Charles (The Thin Man, 1934). Hammett’s hardworking, hardboiled protagonist was relegated to the sidelines.

During the thirteen-year hiatus that followed, the Continental Op was available to readers primarily in Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (each reworked from four linked Black Mask stories released 1927–1929, both published by Knopf in 1929). Red Harvest was ahead of its time—a vivid and exquisitely informed exploration of corruption, pragmatism, and ambiguity, set in Montana mining country. While it was optioned for film, Hammett’s fans could easily have overlooked the Op’s dubious debut as Willie Bindbugel in Ben Hecht’s wildly divergent film adaptation of the novel, released by Paramount as Roadhouse Nights in 1930. Willie played an investigative reporter, rather than a hardboiled detective, in a story that was more action-comedy than crime. Today, the film is most notable as a vehicle for Jimmy Durante in his first big-screen appearance.

The Dain Curse, Hammett’s second novel, featured the Op negotiating San Franciscan family drama, religious fervor, insanity, and drug-induced confusion in a tangled contest between the supernatural and sober reality. Hammett titled the expository final chapter “The Circus” and later described the book as a “silly story.” It is generally considered the least of his five novels. Still, The Dain Curse was a solid performance that garnered largely favorable reviews, earned a spot on the New York Times recommended holiday books list, and won the Op (and Hammett) his first printing in England. The Op was less fortunate in Hollywood, where, despite the fledgling film industry’s thirst for talking-picture storylines, Hammett’s ornate detective thriller came to naught.

The Continental Op’s fortunes rebounded in 1943, when Lawrence Spivak (with Frederick Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, jointly known as Ellery Queen) made arrangements to publish a string of digest-size paperback collections featuring Hammett’s short fiction. Hammett, serving in Alaska with the US Army Signal Corps, agreed unenthusiastically to a deal with Spivak’s Mercury Publications. “I signed the contract,” he told Lillian Hellman, “but don’t take that as a hint that I want it especially.” All but one of the twenty-eight Continental Op standalone tales were reprinted (in sometimes liberally re-edited form) between 1943 and 1951, under Best Seller Mysteries, Jonathan Press Mystery, Mercury Mystery, and Ellery Queen Selects imprints. Once again, the Op was widely available in the working-class world he represented.

Between 1951 and 1961—the last decade of Hammett’s life—virtually no one published the Op, Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont, Nick Charles, or any of Hammett’s fiction. It was the era of the Red scare, with its blacklists and committee hearings, and the beginnings of the Cold War, rife with anti-Soviet fear mongering and jingoistic conservatism. Hammett had made no secret of his leftwing affiliations, and with the taint of the Red brush he became unmarketable. His income was devastated, his publishers wary, the radio shows based on his work cancelled.

“Financially,” Hammett told his wife, Jose, in March of 1951, “this year’s going to be a holy terror and so—from the looks of things right now—are the next few years to come.” Hammett’s estimation was dead-on. He spent five of the last six months of 1951 imprisoned on a contempt of court charge after claiming his Fifth Amendment rights in US District Court. He would neither name the contributors to the Civil Rights Congress of New York bail fund he chaired nor provide information on the whereabouts of four Communist Party leaders who had skipped out on bail the CRC fund had provided. Hammett served his time without regret, but when he was released on December 9, both his health and his finances had crumbled beyond repair. His final bids at political engagement, teaching, and innovative fiction withered away over the course of the next two years. He lived in increasing seclusion and frugality in upstate New York, dependent on the kindness of friends and his monthly veteran’s pension of $131.10.

Hammett died on January 10, 1961. His only significant asset—$7,914.23 held in escrow by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf—was dwarfed by Federal and New York State tax liens totaling nearly $175,000. While a portion of the shortfall might be attributed to slipshod tax reporting on Hammett’s part—he had failed to file returns while he was serving in the Army—the bulk is plainly a bitter byproduct of the US government’s retaliatory anti-communist campaigns. Lillian Hellman attached another $40,000 in claims for repayment of personal loans, in addition to his final medical, funeral, and administrative expenses. She was executrix for the Dashiell Hammett estate and with the approval of the IRS she put the rights to Hammett’s entire body of work up for auction, with the understanding that the sale price (a minimum of $5,000) would settle his outstanding debt.

Lillian Hellman wrote to Hammett’s daughters Mary and Jo to ask if they would be willing to go in with her to make an offer. There is no record of Mary’s reply. But Jo wrote back in June of 1963: “We will be able to send the thousand but it will be a month or six weeks before the cash is available. Is this satisfactory? Please let us know what has developed with the proposed tax settlement.” Hellman ignored Jo’s letter, disregarded her request for updates, and chose instead to pool resources with her friend Arthur Cowan. At the sale in November, she and Cowan won all rights to Hammett’s works with the minimum bid of $5,000. One year later Cowan was killed in a car accident, leaving his share of the Hammett library under Hellman’s complete control. “I am now the sole owner of the estate,” she told Jo.

Having captured Hammett’s literary rights at a bargain-basement rate, Hellman set herself to an ambitious campaign to restore his stifled reputation. She arranged for Random House to publish The Novels of Dashiell Hammett in 1965, followed by Dell paperback editions of The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man in 1966. With that, Hammett’s five major works were back in the marketplace.

The Continental Op made his comeback in The Big Knock-Over collection in 1966, edited and introduced by Hellman. All but one of the nine Op tales she selected had been published originally between 1925 and 1929—which is to say, Hellman’s choices comprised the bulk of the second half of Hammett’s Op oeuvre. Her introduction offers tribute and reminiscence, her glowing portrait of Hammett and the Hammett-Hellman relationship pointedly sentimental rather than squarely factual. “I don’t want modesty for either of us,” she explains. She glosses over Hammett’s early life (his wife and daughters dispatched in just twelve words) with petty inaccuracies, then fleshes out Hammett’s later years with a deft synthesis of personal history and private moments. Some of Hellman’s stories are almost certainly true. But truth, Hellman explained years later, is “slippery, tricky, unreliable.” Hammett’s fiction remained authentic, however, and The Big Knock-Over, published five years after his death, was received enthusiastically. And with it, Hellman’s inaugural foray into the reconstruction of her lover’s life slipped quietly into public consciousness.

The Continental Op collection followed in 1974, edited and introduced by Steven Marcus. He was a friend of Hellman and a respected literary and cultural scholar, but even so Hellman maintained tight control over the editorial process. Early on Marcus suggested twenty-four pieces of Hammett fiction, broken into three sections: Op stories, non-Op stories, and the first, unfinished draft of The Thin Man. Hellman objected, again and again; the book got shorter and shorter. “I do agree with you that Dash grew as a writer … but I don’t think we can base an anthology on the growth since most readers would properly be more interested in the results of the growth,” she argued. In the end, the collection included just seven Op selections, hopscotching between 1924 and 1930. Marcus divided his introduction into two parts—biographical and critical. There are golden echoes of Hellman’s reminisces in the first—especially where they touch on the Hammett-Hellman relationship—and threads of Marxist, Hobbesian, and nihilistic rationale weaving backwards and forwards through the second. Marcus, too, leaves his fingerprints on the Hammett legacy.

Through all of this, barring his ersatz appearance in Roadhouse Nights, the Op was noticeably absent from Hollywood. Hellman did what she could to capitalize on the character’s film and television potential, but it was tough going. Film rights to Red Harvest had been sold to Knopf along with print rights in 1929, as was then the standard. Knopf assigned rights to Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, who, probably in 1972, assigned rights to PEA Films—whose claims continue to constrain Red Harvest’s film and television prospects. Hellman sold film and television rights to several other Op stories to Fast Film and PEA Films in 1974 and 1975—deals that brought her income, but left Hammett’s meaty, middle-aged detective in the wings, future opportunities further entangled. The Dain Curse, perhaps improbably, broke the Op’s dry streak in 1978 with a three-part mini-series on CBS, starring James Coburn as detective Hamilton Nash. The Op had a name and, at last, a legitimate film credit. In the decades before and after, filmic roles for Hammett’s seminal gumshoe have been more inspirational (read uncredited or unrecognizable), than sanctioned or celebrated.

When Lillian Hellman died in 1984 control of the Hammett literary estate passed into a literary trust administered by three of her friends. While the trustees’ oversight was uneven and unenthusiastic, under their tenure two important story collections came to fruition. The first was Nightmare Town, comprising twenty pieces of short fiction, spanning eleven years. The book was slow to come together, as the editors waded through a labyrinth of Hammett-Hellman-Random House permissions and decisions. Nightmare Town was published in 1999, with an introduction by William F. Nolan, who rightly described the anthology as “the largest collection of [Hammett’s] shorter works and by far the most comprehensive.” Seven stories featuring the Continental Op were included.

Just two years later, the prestigious Library of America published Hammett’s Crime Stories and Other Writings, succeeding Nightmare Town as the most comprehensive compilation of Hammett’s short fiction. Steven Marcus, then free from Hellman’s micro-managing oversight, selected twenty-seven pieces, including all but eight of the twenty-eight Op stories. Contractual limitations dealing with reprints in competing publications made full inclusion problematic. Nevertheless, the volume is handsome and enlightening. Margaret Atwood, a Hammett fan of longstanding, said it took readers “back to the beginning of the line” and showed why Hammett’s popularity had risen so rapidly. The mere presence of Crime Stories and Other Writings among Library of America’s illustrious volumes is proof of esteem for Hammett’s work that survived his pulp fiction origins nearly eight decades earlier.

Lillian Hellman’s appointees to the Dashiell Hammett literary trust ceded control to the Hammett family in 2003. Because rights to the five novels had already been transferred to Jo Hammett, in 1995 in a negotiated agreement based on copyright extension law, the change in administration applied mainly to Hammett’s short stories—and to the Op in particular. The new trustees (including Hammett’s grandson, Evan Marshall, and the editors of this volume) took seriously their responsibility to Hammett’s legacy. What followed was a new season of engagement and publication, in the United States and abroad. Hammett never ventured overseas, but his Op is a veteran traveler, with recent excursions that include Brazil, Italy, Romania, Poland, Germany, England, and, most notably, France, where a Hammett renaissance has resulted in a flock of new translations and paperback compilations, as well as, in 2011, an omnibus volume that collected virtually all of Hammett’s available fiction.

This electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories comes 93 years after his “little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit” narrated his first investigation in Black Mask magazine in 1923. It is the first opportunity for readers across the globe to enjoy both what Hammett called “a more complete and true picture of a detective at work” and to witness the growth of his creator, who changed the face of not just American crime fiction, but realistic, literary, and entertaining fiction worldwide. The stories are presented chronologically, with section introductions providing context and insights into Hammett’s evolution under his three Black Mask editors—George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody, and Joseph Thompson Shaw. Headnotes original to each story’s publication are included, along with Hammett’s remarks in letters to the editors. “Three Dimes”—an incomplete Continental Op adventure preserved in Hammett’s archive—is included as a bonus to the complete volume.

We offer no pulp paper. No cloth-covered boards or dust jacket. No lurid cover art. No sewn binding or ribbon. Just Hammett’s words, as originally published in Black Mask, True Detective Stories, and Mystery Stories. Our only modifications are silent corrections to spelling and typographical errors preserved on the rare, fragile pages of Hammett’s original magazine offerings. Modern publishing provides distinct advantages to those of us who edit—who collect and prepare materials for publication—leaving us grateful for today’s more durable manuscripts, nimble word-processing technologies, and the easy mutability of e-files.

Hammett, however, was a man of an earlier era—writing with typewriters or pen, pencil, and paper, computers unconceived. He read bound books, hardcopy magazines, and newspapers in those decades when “papers” was not a metaphor. His image lingers in vintage shades of black and white, bound up with the Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles, washed in afterlife with Lillian Hellman’s painterly recollections. It’s tempting, then, to imagine our crime-fiction champion rejecting e-reading in favor of bookbinding’s tactile pleasures and traditions. “I tell you, it wasn’t like this when I was young,” Hammett wrote in 1950. “The world’s going to hell: some people claim radio and movies are responsible, but I think it started with the invention of the wheel. If man had been meant to revolve he wouldn’t have been born with flat feet.”

He was kidding, of course.

Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today’s e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It’s a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.

J.M.R.

INTRODUCTION

The Early Years: 1923–1924

Dashiell Hammett may have been born with the urge to write, we can’t know, but it was happenstance that set the course for his literary fame. His first choice of careers was private investigation. When he turned twenty-one, he joined Pinkerton’s National Detective Service as an operative, a job he enjoyed for three years, from 1915 to 1918, before joining the army. He served in a medical unit at Fort Bragg, Maryland, an intake center for soldiers infected with Spanish Influenza returning from the war in Europe. Hammett contracted the flu himself, and that activated a latent strain of tuberculosis probably spread from his mother. He left the army after just less than a year with a sergeant’s rating, an honorable discharge, and a disability rating that fluctuated over the next ten years between 20% and 100%, usually hovering midway in between.

After a period of convalescence, Hammett returned to detective work sporadically, until he was hospitalized with tuberculosis for some six months from November 1920 to the following May. Upon his release from the hospital, he moved to San Francisco and married his nurse, Josephine Dolan, in July 1921. Their daughter Mary was born in October. Hammett tried to support his new family as a detective, but he was unable. He retired permanently from the agency in either December 1921 or February 1922, depending on which evidence you choose to accept, due to disability. He was twenty-six, often a virtual invalid, and he needed money.

In February 1922 he commenced a year and a half of study at Munson’s School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper reporting objective,” as he wrote in his disability log for the Veterans Bureau. The training shows. His early fiction has a journalistic quality about it—in the best sense. It is clearly written, detail oriented, and plainly narrated, without the strained and sensationalistic flourishes that mark the fiction of other early pulp writers. In October 1922 he began submitting humorous and ironic sketches to The Smart Set, the high-brow magazine edited and partially owned by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At their suggestion, after publishing three of his sketches, he lowered his sights to pulp magazines, which offered him steady, if not hefty, paychecks but required that he alter his subject matter. He made his living during most of the twenties on the back of what soon became his series character, the Continental Op, a professional detective.

Hammett’s Continental Op is inseparable from the pulp magazine Black Mask, which was barely three years old and under new ownership when the Continental Op was introduced. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight published Op stories first appeared there between October 1923 and November 1930, as well as two four-part serial novels featuring the Op. Founded in 1920 by Mencken and Nathan to publish what Mencken called in My Life as Author and Editor “hacks of experience,” writing for “murder fans.” Black Mask had no literary pretensions in the beginning. Its sole purpose was to make money. Mencken claimed in a 1933 letter to his friend Philip Goodman that he and Nathan could “get out a 128-page magazine at a cash outlay of no more than $500” and did so in the case of Black Mask. With “no desire to go on with the Black Mask.” Mencken and Nathan sold it in summer 1921 to Eugene Crowe and Eltinge Warner (just before Crowe’s death), having earned about $25,000 each for their efforts. From the beginning the magazine was aimed at a blue-collar audience who wanted entertaining stories. Though it is known now as the publication that pioneered hard-boiled detective fiction, in the 10 October 1923 issue, the editor bragged that Black Mask published “Rugged adventure and real man and woman romance; rare Western yarns, swift-acting logical detective stories, weird, creepy mystery tales, and the only thrilling, convincing ghost stories to be found anywhere.” In that mix, Hammett found no models, and his sure-footed stories stood out—initially because of their confident, plausible prose and notable absence of gratuitous violence.

Hammett used pseudonyms for his earliest Black Mask stories, usually Peter Collinson (from theatre slang for a phantom person). One might guess, and it is only a guess, that he was embarrassed to appear in the cheap pulps—certainly he spoke disparagingly of them later in his life. But he dropped his guard when he was asked for a comment about “the Vicious Circle,” a story about a politician reacting to blackmail published in the15 June 1923 Black Mask as by Collinson. Hammett replied that the story, which does not feature the Op, was based on cases he experienced as a private detective. He signed the response “S. D. Hammett” and soon afterward abandoned the Collinson pseudonym altogether. Sutton missed the reference. Even though Hammett took particular care in those early stories to describe accurately how a private detective went about his job and in “Zigzags of Treachery” (1 March 1924) provided specific how-to advice, it wasn’t until later that Sutton’s successor recognized the real-life experience that shaped the Op’s workman-like approaches to his cases.

Writers rarely develop in a vacuum. In Hammett’s case, the course of his literary development seems clearly enough to have been molded by his editors. He came to write detective fiction because Mencken saw no future for him among the smart set, and at Black Mask he clearly was guided in the beginning by his editors’ ideas about what would sell in their market, ideas that changed with the man in charge. George W. Sutton, the Black Mask editor who agreed after three months on the job to publish “Arson Plus,” had no literary qualifications. He, described himself this way in a farewell message to readers in the 15 March 1924 issue, the last for which he had responsibility:

The Editor is primarily a writer of automobile and motorboat articles, and all during the wonderful period that he has been at the helm of BLACK MASK, he has continued his automobile departments in various publications; using the afternoons and most of every night, every Sunday and holiday, to read the thousands of stories which come in to BLACK MASK—editing them, consulting with authors and artists, writing to readers, and attending to the thousands of details that make up the work necessary to getting out a “peppy” fiction magazine.

Sutton’s “various publications” included Vanity Fair, Collier’s, Town & Country, Popular Mechanics, and newspaper syndication.

In 1923 Sutton wrote a memo to prospective writers called “The Present needs of Black Mask,” in which he lamented that “BLACK MASK finds it very difficult to get exactly the kind of stories it wants. We can print stories of horror, supernatural but explainable phenomena and gruesome tales which no other magazine in the country would print, but they must be about human beings, convincing, entertaining, and interest impelling.” Sutton warned in his memo: “We do not care for purely scientific detective stories which lack action; and we are prejudiced by experience against the psychological story which is not very rugged and intense.”

Though Black Mask is regarded, appropriately, as the birthplace of hard-boiled fiction, the hard-boiled story was still in gestation under Sutton. While crime was a staple of his Black Mask, it was but one ingredient of the editorial mix, and only the earliest stories of Carroll John Daly, featuring cartoonishly violent protagonists acting out what seem to be the author’s homicidal, tough-guy fantasies, could properly be called hard boiled. Hammett set out to fulfill Black Mask’s needs with stories about a short, portly, tough, nameless detective for the Continental Detective Agency, based obviously on Pinkerton’s, who described his cases in procedural detail.

Hammett was known to Sutton and his associate editor Harry North only through correspondence and his fiction. Hammett lived in San Francisco; the editorial offices were in New York. Sutton made an effort to stay in touch with his writers and his readers, though. He solicited letters from his writers about the genesis of their stories, and he encouraged readers to write in with their reactions, which he published, criticisms and all. Hammett responded to Sutton’s requests regularly, and his letters are included here after the stories on which they comment.

By the time his fourth Op story was published, Hammett was advertised by Sutton as having “suddenly become one of the most popular of Black Mask writers, because his stories are always entertaining, full of action and very unusual situations.” They were also notably restrained by Black Mask standards. In those first four stories the Op does not carry a gun. In the first two there are no deaths; in the third there is one offstage murder and one murder before the story begins; and in the fourth there is one off- stage murder and one shooting. In the next five stories, Hammett’s last under Sutton’s editorship, there are a total of five murders during the action. Though the Op had an occasional fistfight, under Sutton he never killed a person; the crooks are the murderous ones. But Sutton went back to motorsports at the end of March 1924—his Camping by the Highway: Autocamper’s Handbook and Directory of Camp Sites was published by Field and Stream Publishing Company in 1925—and though Hammett was among the core writers on whose talents Sutton’s successors planned to build, the new editor had different ideas about what makes an entertaining story.

The reputations of Hammett and the magazine that nurtured his talent rose together, and by 1930 each had altered the course of English-language literature. Black Mask had grown in circulation to 100,000 copies a month, and it was grudgingly respected as the unquestioned king of the pulps, beginning to show its influence in the mainstream development of tough-guy literature. Hammett, already regarded as the master of the hard-boiled detective story, was being recognized as a major force in what arguably can be called America’s most talented literary generation, the generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. Hammett did not regard the Op stories, early or late, as his best work—he reserved that distinction for The Maltese Falcon (serialized in Black Mask from September 1928–January 1929) and The Glass Key (serialized in Black Mask from March to June 1930)—but there is no question that he used these stories to test characters, plots, and dialogue he used in his novels, and his genius shines through in every one.

R.L.

ARSON PLUS

Black Mask, 1 October 1923

Dashiell Hammett writing as Peter Collinson, author of “The Vicious Circle”[1]

This is a detective story you’ll have a hard time solving before the end. Form your ideas of the outcome as you go along and then see how near you guessed it.

Jim Tarr picked up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end, and reached for a match.

“Fifteen cents straight,” he said. “You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time.”

I had been doing business with this fat sheriff of Sacramento County for four or five years—ever since I came to the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office—and I had never known him to miss an opening for a sour crack; but it didn’t mean anything.

“Wrong both times,” I told him. “I get two of them for a quarter; and I’m here to do you a favor instead of asking for one. The company that insured Thornburgh’s house thinks somebody touched it off.”

“That’s right enough, according to the fire department. They tell me the lower part of the house was soaked with gasoline, but God knows how they could tell—there wasn’t a stick left standing. I’ve got McClump working on it, but he hasn’t found anything to get excited about yet.”

“What’s the layout? All I know is that there was a fire.”

Tarr leaned back in his chair, turned his red face to the ceiling, and bellowed:

“Hey, Mac!”

The pearl push-buttons on his desk are ornaments as far as he is concerned. Deputy sheriffs McHale, McClump and Macklin came to the door together—MacNab apparently wasn’t within hearing.

“What’s the idea?” the sheriff demanded of McClump. “Are you carrying a bodyguard around with you?”

The two other deputies, thus informed as to who “Mac” referred to this time, went back to their cribbage game.

“We got a city slicker here to catch our firebug for us,” Tarr told his deputy. “But we got to tell him what it’s all about first.”

McClump and I had worked together on an express robbery, several months before. He’s a rangy, towheaded youngster of twenty-five or six, with all the nerve in the world—and most of the laziness.

“Ain’t the Lord good to us?”

He had himself draped across a chair by now—always his first objective when he comes into a room.

“Well, here’s how she stands: This fellow Thornburgh’s house was a couple miles out of town, on the old county road—an old frame house. About midnight, night before last, Jeff Pringle—the nearest neighbor, a half-mile or so to the east—saw a glare in the sky from over that way, and phoned in the alarm; but by the time the fire wagons got there, there wasn’t enough of the house left to bother about. Pringle was the first of the neighbors to get to the house, and the roof had already fell in then.

“Nobody saw anything suspicious—no strangers hanging around or nothing. Thornburgh’s help just managed to save themselves, and that was all. They don’t know much about what happened—too scared, I reckon. But they did see Thornburgh at his window just before the fire got him. A fellow here in town—name of Handerson—saw that part of it too. He was driving home from Wayton, and got to the house just before the roof caved in.

“The fire department people say they found signs of gasoline. The Coonses, Thornburgh’s help, say they didn’t have no gas on the place. So there you are.”

“Thornburgh have any relatives?”

“Yeah. A niece in San Francisco—a Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge. She was up yesterday, but there wasn’t nothing she could do, and she couldn’t tell us nothing much, so she went back home.”

“Where are the servants now?”

“Here in town. Staying at a hotel on I Street. I told ’em to stick around for a few days.”

“Thornburgh own the house?”

“Uh-huh. Bought it from Newning & Weed a couple months ago.”

“You got anything to do this morning?”

“Nothing but this.”

“Good! Let’s get out and dig around.”

We found the Coonses in their room at the hotel on I Street. Mr. Coons was a small-boned, plump man with the smooth, meaningless face, and the suavity of the typical male house-servant.

His wife was a tall, stringy woman, perhaps five years older than her husband—say, forty—with a mouth and chin that seemed shaped for gossiping. But he did all the talking, while she nodded her agreement to every second or third word.

“We went to work for Mr. Thornburgh on the fifteenth of June, I think,” he said, in reply to my first question. “We came to Sacramento, around the first of the month, and put in applications at the Allis Employment Bureau. A couple of weeks later they sent us out to see Mr. Thornburgh, and he took us on.”

“Where were you before you came here?”

“In Seattle, sir, with a Mrs. Comerford; but the climate there didn’t agree with my wife—she has bronchial trouble—so we decided to come to California. We most likely would have stayed in Seattle, though, if Mrs. Comerford hadn’t given up her house.”

“What do you know about Thornburgh?”

“Very little, sir. He wasn’t a talkative gentleman. He hadn’t any business that I know of. I think he was a retired seafaring man. He never said he was, but he had that manner and look. He never went out or had anybody in to see him, except his niece once, and he didn’t write or get any mail. He had a room next to his bedroom fixed up as a sort of workshop. He spent most of his time in there. I always thought he was working on some kind of invention, but he kept the door locked, and wouldn’t let us go near it.”

“Haven’t you any idea at all what it was?”

“No, sir. We never heard any hammering or noises from it, and never smelt anything either. And none of his clothes were ever the least bit soiled, even when they were ready to go out to the laundry. They would have been if he had been working on anything like machinery.”

“Was he an old man?”

“He couldn’t have been over fifty, sir. He was very erect, and his hair and beard were thick, with no grey hairs.”

“Ever have any trouble with him?”

“Oh, no, sir! He was, if I may say it, a very peculiar gentleman in a way; and he didn’t care about anything except having his meals fixed right, having his clothes taken care of—he was very particular about them—and not being disturbed. Except early in the morning and at night, we’d hardly see him all day.”

“Now about the fire. Tell us the whole thing—everything you remember.”

“Well, sir, I and my wife had gone to bed about ten o’clock, our regular time, and had gone to sleep. Our room was on the second floor, in the rear. Some time later—I never did exactly know what time it was—I woke up, coughing. The room was all full of smoke, and my wife was sort of strangling. I jumped up, and dragged her down the back stairs and out the back door, not thinking of anything but getting her out of there.

“When I had her safe in the yard, I thought of Mr. Thornburgh, and tried to get back in the house; but the whole first floor was just flames. I ran around front then, to see if he had got out, but didn’t see anything of him. The whole yard was as light as day by then. Then I heard him scream—a horrible scream, sir—I can hear it yet! And I looked up at his window—that was the front second-story room—and saw him there, trying to get out the window. But all the woodwork was burning, and he screamed again and fell back, and right after that the roof over his room fell in.

“There wasn’t a ladder or anything that I could have put up to the window for him—there wasn’t anything I could have done.

“In the meantime, a gentleman had left his automobile in the road, and come up to where I was standing; but there wasn’t anything we could do—the house was burning everywhere and falling in here and there. So we went back to where I had left my wife, and carried her farther away from the fire, and brought her to—she had fainted. And that’s all I know about it, sir.”

“Hear any noises earlier that night? Or see anybody hanging around?”

“No, sir.”

“Have any gasoline around the place?”

“No, sir. Mr. Thornburgh didn’t have a car.”

“No gasoline for cleaning?”

“No, sir, none at all, unless Mr. Thornburgh had it in his workshop. When his clothes needed cleaning, I took them to town, and all his laundry was taken by the grocer’s man, when he brought our provisions.”

“Don’t know anything that might have some bearing on the fire?”

“No, sir. I was surprised when I heard that somebody had set the house afire. I could hardly believe it. I don’t know why anybody should want to do that.”

“What do you think of them?” I asked McClump, as we left the hotel.

“They might pad the bills, or even go South with some of the silver, but they don’t figure as killers in my mind.”

That was my opinion, too; but they were the only persons known to have been there when the fire started except the man who had died. We went around to the Allis Employment Bureau and talked to the manager.

He told us that the Coonses had come into his office on June second, looking for work; and had given Mrs. Edward Comerford, 45 Woodmansee Terrace, Seattle, Washington, as reference. In reply to a letter—he always checked up the references of servants—Mrs. Comerford had written that the Coonses had been in her employ for a number of years, and had been “extremely satisfactory in every respect.” On June thirteenth, Thornburgh had telephoned the bureau, asking that a man and his wife be sent out to keep house for him; and Allis had sent two couples that he had listed. Neither had been employed by Thornburgh, though Allis considered them more desirable than the Coonses, who were finally hired by Thornburgh.

All that would certainly seem to indicate that the Coonses hadn’t deliberately maneuvered themselves into the place, unless they were the luckiest people in the world—and a detective can’t afford to believe in luck or coincidence, unless he has unquestionable proof of it.

At the office of the real estate agents, through whom Thornburgh had bought the house—Newning & Weed—we were told that Thornburgh had come in on the eleventh of June, and had said that he had been told that the house was for sale, had looked it over, and wanted to know the price. The deal had been closed the next morning, and he had paid for the house with a check for $4,500 on the Seamen’s Bank of San Francisco. The house was already furnished.

After luncheon, McClump and I called on Howard Handerson—the man who had seen the fire while driving home from Wayton. He had an office in the Empire Building, with his name and the title “Northern California Agent, Instant-Sheen Cleanser Company,” on the door. He was a big, careless-looking man of forty-five or so, with the professionally jovial smile that belongs to the salesman.

He had been in Wayton on business the day of the fire, he said, and had stayed there until rather late, going to dinner and afterward playing pool with a grocer named Hammersmith—one of his customers. He had left Wayton in his machine, at about ten-thirty, and set out for Sacramento. At Tavender he had stopped at the garage for oil and gas and to have one of his tires blown up.

Just as he was about to leave the garage, the garage-man had called his attention to a red glare in the sky, and had told him that it was probably from a fire somewhere along the old county road that paralleled the State road into Sacramento; so Handerson had taken the county road, and had arrived at the burning house just in time to see Thornburgh try to fight his way through the flames that enveloped him.

It was too late to make any attempt to put out the fire, and the man upstairs was beyond saving by then—undoubtedly dead even before the roof collapsed; so Handerson had helped Coons revive his wife, and stayed there watching the fire until it had burned itself out. He had seen no one on that county road while driving to the fire.

“What do you know about Handerson?” I asked McClump, when we were on the street.

“Came here, from somewhere in the East, I think, early in the summer to open that Cleanser agency. Lives at the Garden Hotel. Where do we go next?”

“We get a machine, and take a look at what’s left of the Thornburgh house.”

AN enterprising incendiary couldn’t have found a lovelier spot in which to turn himself loose, if he looked the whole county over. Tree-topped hills hid it from the rest of the world, on three sides; while away from the fourth, an uninhabited plain rolled down to the river. The county road that passed the front gate was shunned by automobiles, so McClump said, in favor of the State Highway to the north.

Where the house had been, was now a mound of blackened ruins. We poked around in the ashes for a few minutes—not that we expected to find anything, but because it’s the nature of man to poke around in ruins.

A garage in the rear, whose interior gave no evidence of recent occupation, had a badly scorched roof and front, but was otherwise undamaged. A shed behind it, sheltering an ax, a shovel, and various odds and ends of gardening tools, had escaped the fire altogether. The lawn in front of the house, and the garden behind the shed—about an acre in all—had been pretty thoroughly cut and trampled by wagon wheels, and the feet of the firemen and the spectators.

Having ruined our shoe-shines, McClump and I got back in our machine and swung off in a circle around the place, calling at all the houses within a mile radius, and getting little besides jolts for our trouble.

The nearest house was that of Pringle, the man who had turned in the alarm; but he not only knew nothing about the dead man, but said he had never seen him. In fact, only one of the neighbors had ever seen him: a Mrs. Jabine, who lived about a mile to the south.

She had taken care of the key to the house while it was vacant; and a day or two before he bought it, Thornburgh had come to her house, inquiring about the vacant one. She had gone over there with him and showed him through it, and he had told her that he intended buying it, if the price, of which neither of them knew anything, wasn’t too high.

He had been alone, except for the chauffeur of the hired car in which he had come from Sacramento, and, save that he had no family, he had told her nothing about himself.

Hearing that he had moved in, she went over to call on him several days later—“just a neighborly visit”—but had been told by Mrs. Coons that he was not at home. Most of the neighbors had talked to the Coonses, and had got the impression that Thornburgh did not care for visitors, so they had let him alone. The Coonses were described as “pleasant enough to talk to when you meet them,” but reflecting their employer’s desire not to make friends.

McClump summarized what the afternoon had taught us as we pointed our machine toward Tavender: “Any of these folks could have touched off the place, but we got nothing to show that any of ’em even knew Thornburgh, let alone had a bone to pick with him.”

Tavender turned out to be a crossroads settlement of a general store and post office, a garage, a church, and six dwellings, about two miles from Thornburgh’s place. McClump knew the storekeeper and postmaster, a scrawny little man named Philo, who stuttered moistly.

“I n-n-never s-saw Th-thornburgh,” he said, “and I n-n-never had any m-mail for him. C-coons”—it sounded like one of these things butterflies come out of—“used to c-come in once a week t-to order groceries—they d-didn’t have a phone. He used to walk in, and I’d s-send the stuff over in my c-c-car. Th-then I’d s-see him once in a while, waiting f-for the stage to S-s-sacramento.”

“Who drove the stuff out to Thornburgh’s?”

“M-m-my b-boy. Want to t-talk to him?”

The boy was a juvenile edition of the old man, but without the stutter. He had never seen Thornburgh on any of his visits, but his business had taken him only as far as the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed anything peculiar about the place.

“Who’s the night man at the garage?” I asked him, after we had listened to the little he had to tell.

“Billy Luce. I think you can catch him there now. I saw him go in a few minutes ago.”

We crossed the road and found Luce.

“Night before last—the night of the fire down the road—was there a man here talking to you when you first saw it?”

He turned his eyes upward in that vacant stare which people use to aid their memory.

“Yes, I remember now! He was going to town, and I told him that if he took the county road instead of the State Road he’d see the fire on his way in.”

“What kind of looking man was he?”

“Middle-aged—a big man, but sort of slouchy. I think he had on a brown suit, baggy and wrinkled.”

“Medium complexion?”

“Yes.”

“Smile when he talked?”

“Yes, a pleasant sort of fellow.”

“Curly brown hair?”

“Have a heart!” Luce laughed. “I didn’t put him under a magnifying glass.”

From Tavender, we drove over to Wayton. Luce’s description had fit Handerson all right; but while we were at it, we thought we might as well check up to make sure that he had been coming from Wayton.

We spent exactly twenty-five minutes in Wayton; ten of them finding Hammersmith, the grocer with whom Handerson had said he dined and played pool; five minutes finding the proprietor of the pool-room; and ten verifying Handerson’s story.

“What do you think of it now, Mac?” I asked, as we rolled back toward Sacramento.

Mac’s too lazy to express an opinion, or even form one, unless he’s driven to it; but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth listening to, if you can get them.

“There ain’t a hell of a lot to think,” he said cheerfully. “Handerson is out of it, if he ever was in it. There’s nothing to show that anybody but the Coonses and Thornburgh were there when the fire started—but there may have been a regiment there. Them Coonses ain’t too honest looking, maybe, but they ain’t killers, or I miss my guess. But the fact remains that they’re the only bet we got so far. Maybe we ought to try to get a line on them.”

“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll get a wire off to our Seattle office asking them to interview Mrs. Comerford, and see what she can tell about them as soon as we get back in town. Then I’m going to catch a train for San Francisco, and see Thornburgh’s niece in the morning.”

Next morning, at the address McClump had given me—a rather elaborate apartment building on California Street—I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress. If I had been younger, or a social caller, I suppose I’d have felt amply rewarded when she finally came in—a tall, slender woman of less than thirty; in some sort of clinging black affair; with a lot of black hair over a very white face, strikingly set off by a small red mouth and big hazel eyes that looked black until you got close to them.

But I was a busy, middle-aged detective, who was fuming over having his time wasted; and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty. However, I smothered my grouch, apologized for disturbing her at such an early hour, and got down to business.

“I want you to tell me all you know about your uncle—his family, friends, enemies, business connections, everything.”

I had scribbled on the back of the card I had sent into her what my business was.

“He hadn’t any family,” she said; “unless I might be it. He was my mother’s brother, and I am the only one of that family now living.”

“Where was he born?”

“Here in San Francisco. I don’t know the date, but he was about fifty years old, I think—three years older than my mother.”

“What was his business?”

“He went to sea when he was a boy, and, so far as I know, always followed it until a few months ago.”

“Captain?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I wouldn’t see or hear from him for several years, and he never talked about what he was doing; though he would mention some of the places he had visited—Rio de Janeiro, Madagascar, Tobago, Christiania. Then, about three months ago—some time in May—he came here and told me that he was through with wandering; that he was going to take a house in some quiet place where he could work undisturbed on an invention in which he was interested.

“He lived at the Francisco Hotel while he was in San Francisco. After a couple of weeks, he suddenly disappeared. And then, about a month ago, I received a telegram from him, asking me to come to see him at his house near Sacramento. I went up the very next day, and I thought that he was acting very queerly—he seemed very excited over something. He gave me a will that he had just drawn up and some life insurance policies in which I was beneficiary.

“Immediately after that he insisted that I return home, and hinted rather plainly that he did not wish me to either visit him again or write until I heard from him. I thought all that rather peculiar, as he had always seemed fond of me. I never saw him again.”

“What was this invention he was working on?”

“I really don’t know. I asked him once, but he became so excited—even suspicious—that I changed the subject, and never mentioned it again.”

“Are you sure that he really did follow the sea all those years?”

“No, I am not. I just took it for granted; but he may have been doing something altogether different.”

“Was he ever married?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Know any of his friends or enemies?”

“No, none.”

“Remember anybody’s name that he ever mentioned?”

“No.”

“I don’t want you to think this next question insulting, though I admit it is. But it has to be asked. Where were you the night of the fire?”

“At home; I had some friends here to dinner, and they stayed until about midnight. Mr. and Mrs. Walker Kellogg, Mrs. John Dupree, and a Mr. Killmer, who is a lawyer. I can give you their addresses, or you can get them from the phone book, if you want to question them.”

From Mrs. Trowbridge’s apartment I went to the Francisco Hotel. Thornburgh had been registered there from May tenth to June thirteenth, and hadn’t attracted much attention. He had been a tall, broad-shouldered, erect man of about fifty, with rather long brown hair brushed straight back; a short, pointed brown beard, and healthy, ruddy complexion—grave, quiet, punctilious in dress and manner; his hours had been regular and he had had no visitors that any of the hotel employes remembered.

At the Seamen’s Bank—upon which Thornburgh’s check, in payment of the house, had been drawn—I was told that he had opened an account there on May fifteenth, having been introduced by W. W. Jeffers & Sons, local stock brokers. A balance of a little more than four hundred dollars remained to his credit. The cancelled checks on hand were all to the order of various life insurance companies; and for amounts that, if they represented premiums, testified to rather large policies. I jotted down the names of the life insurance companies, and then went to the offices of W. W. Jeffers & Sons.

Thornburgh had come in, I was told, on the tenth of May with $4,000 worth of Liberty bonds that he wanted sold. During one of his conversations with Jeffers, he had asked the broker to recommend a bank, and Jeffers had given him a letter of introduction to the Seamen’s Bank.

That was all Jeffers knew about him. He gave me the numbers of the bonds, but tracing Liberty bonds isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

The reply to my Seattle telegram was waiting for me at the Agency when I arrived.

MRS. EDWARD COMERFORD RENTED APARTMENT AT ADDRESS YOU GIVE ON MAY TWENTY-FIVE GAVE IT UP JUNE SIX TRUNKS TO SAN FRANCISCO SAME DAY CHECK NUMBERS GN FOUR FIVE TWO FIVE EIGHT SEVEN AND EIGHT AND NINE

Tracing baggage is no trick at all, if you have the dates and check numbers to start with—as many a bird who is wearing somewhat similar numbers on his chest and back, because he overlooked that detail when making his getaway, can tell you—and twenty-five minutes in a baggage-room at the Ferry and half an hour in the office of a transfer company gave me my answer.

The trunks had been delivered to Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge’s apartment!

I got Jim Tarr on the phone and told him about it.

“Good shooting!” he said, forgetting for once to indulge his wit. “We’ll grab the Coonses here and Mrs. Trowbridge there, and that’s the end of another mystery.”

“Wait a minute!” I cautioned him. “It’s not all straightened out yet! There’s still a few kinks in the plot.”

“It’s straight enough for me. I’m satisfied.”

“You’re the boss, but I think you’re being a little hasty. I’m going up and talk with the niece again. Give me a little time before you phone the police here to make the pinch. I’ll hold her until they get there.”

Evelyn Trowbridge let me in this time, instead of the maid who had opened the door for me in the morning, and she led me to the same room in which we had had our first talk. I let her pick out a seat, and then I selected one that was closer to either door than hers was.

On the way up I had planned a lot of innocent-sounding questions that would get her all snarled up; but after taking a good look at this woman sitting in front of me, leaning comfortably back in her chair, coolly waiting for me to speak my piece, I discarded the trick stuff and came out cold-turkey.

“Ever use the name Mrs. Edward Comerford?”

“Oh, yes.” As casual as a nod on the street.

“When?”

“Often. You see, I happen to have been married not so long ago to Mr. Edward Comerford. So it’s not really strange that I should have used the name.”

“Use it in Seattle recently?”

“I would suggest,” she said sweetly, “that if you are leading up to the references I gave Coons and his wife, you might save time by coming right to it?”

“That’s fair enough,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

There wasn’t a half-tone, a shading, in voice, manner, or expression to indicate that she was talking about anything half so serious or important to her as a possibility of being charged with murder. She might have been talking about the weather, or a book that hadn’t interested her particularly.

“During the time that Mr. Comerford and I were married, we lived in Seattle, where he still lives. After the divorce, I left Seattle and resumed my maiden name. And the Coonses were in our employ, as you might learn if you care to look it up. You’ll find my husband—or former husband—at the Chelsea apartments, I think.

“Last summer, or late spring, I decided to return to Seattle. The truth of it is—I suppose all my personal affairs will be aired anyhow—that I thought perhaps Edward and I might patch up our differences; so I went back and took an apartment on Woodmansee Terrace. As I was known in Seattle as Mrs. Edward Comerford, and as I thought my using his name might influence him a little, perhaps, I used it while I was there.

“Also I telephoned the Coonses to make tentative arrangements in case Edward and I should open our house again; but Coons told me that they were going to California, and so I gladly gave them an excellent recommendation when, some days later, I received a letter of inquiry from an employment bureau in Sacramento. After I had been in Seattle for about two weeks, I changed my mind about the reconciliation—Edward’s interest, I learned, was all centered elsewhere; so I returned to San Francisco.”

“Very nice! But—”

“If you will permit me to finish,” she interrupted. “When I went to see my uncle in response to his telegram, I was surprised to find the Coonses in his house. Knowing my uncle’s peculiarities, and finding them now increased, and remembering his extreme secretiveness about his mysterious invention, I cautioned the Coonses not to tell him that they had been in my employ.

“He certainly would have discharged them, and just as certainly would have quarreled with me—he would have thought that I was having him spied upon. Then, when Coons telephoned me after the fire, I knew that to admit that the Coonses had been formerly in my employ, would, in view of the fact that I was my uncle’s heir, cast suspicion on all three of us. So we foolishly agreed to say nothing about it and carry on the deception.”

That didn’t sound all wrong, but it didn’t sound all right. I wished Tarr had taken it easier and let us get a better line on these people, before having them thrown in the coop.

“The coincidence of the Coonses stumbling into my uncle’s house is, I fancy, too much for your detecting instincts,” she went on, as I didn’t say anything. “Am I to consider myself under arrest?”

I’m beginning to like this girl; she’s a nice, cool piece of work.

“Not yet,” I told her. “But I’m afraid it’s going to happen pretty soon.”

She smiled a little mocking smile at that, and another when the doorbell rang.

It was O’Hara from police headquarters. We turned the apartment upside down and inside out, but didn’t find anything of importance except the will she had told me about, dated July eighth, and her uncle’s life insurance policies. They were all dated between May fifteenth and June tenth, and added up to a little more than $200,000.

I spent an hour grilling the maid after O’Hara had taken Evelyn Trowbridge away, but she didn’t know any more than I did. However, between her, the janitor, the manager of the apartments, and the names Mrs. Trowbridge had given me, I learned that she had really been entertaining friends on the night of the fire—until after eleven o’clock, anyway—and that was late enough.

Half an hour later I was riding the Short Line back to Sacramento. I was getting to be one of the line’s best customers, and my anatomy was on bouncing terms with every bump in the road; and the bumps, as “Rubberhead” Davis used to say about the flies and mosquitoes in Alberta in summer, “is freely plentiful.”

Between bumps I tried to fit the pieces of this Thornburgh puzzle together. The niece and the Coonses fit in somewhere, but not just where we had them. We had been working on the job sort of lop-sided, but it was the best we could do with it. In the beginning we had turned to the Coonses and Evelyn Trowbridge because there was no other direction to go; and now we had something on them—but a good lawyer could make hash of our case against them.

The Coonses were in the county jail when I got to Sacramento. After some questioning they had admitted their connection with the niece, and had come through with stories that matched hers in every detail.

Tarr, McClump, and I sat around the sheriff’s desk and argued.

“Those yarns are pipe-dreams,” the sheriff said. “We got all three of ’em cold, and there’s nothing else to it. They’re as good as convicted of murder!”

McClump grinned derisively at his superior, and then turned to me.

“Go on! You tell him about the holes in his little case. He ain’t your boss, and can’t take it out on you later for being smarter than he is!”

Tarr glared from one of us to the other.

“Spill it, you wise guys!” he ordered.

“Our dope is,” I told him, figuring that McClump’s view of it was the same as mine, “that there’s nothing to show that even Thornburgh knew he was going to buy that house before the tenth of June, and that the Coonses were in town looking for work on the second. And besides, it was only by luck that they got the jobs. The employment office sent two couples out there ahead of them.”

“We’ll take a chance on letting the jury figure that out.”

“Yes? You’ll also take a chance on them figuring out that Thornburgh, who seems to have been a nut all right, might have touched off the place himself! We’ve got something on these people, Jim, but not enough to go into court with them! How are you going to prove that when the Coonses were planted in Thornburgh’s house—if you can even prove they were—they and the Trowbridge woman knew he was going to load up with insurance policies?”

The sheriff spat disgustedly.

“You guys are the limit! You run around in circles, digging up the dope on these people until you get enough to hang ’em, and then you run around hunting for outs! What the hell’s the matter with you now?”

I answered him from half-way to the door—the pieces were beginning to fit together under my skull.

“Going to run some more circles! Come on, Mac!”

McClump and I held a conference on the fly, and then I got a machine from the nearest garage and headed for Tavender. We made time going out, and got there before the general store had closed for the night. The stuttering Philo separated himself from the two men with whom he had been talking Hiram Johnson, and followed me to the rear of the store.

“Do you keep an itemized list of the laundry you handle?”

“N-n-no; just the amounts.”

“Let’s look at Thornburgh’s.”

He produced a begrimed and rumpled account book and we picked out the weekly items I wanted: $2.60, $3.10, $2.25, and so on.

“Got the last batch of laundry here?”

“Y-yes,” he said. “It j-just c-c-came out from the city t-today.”

I tore open the bundle—some sheets, pillow-cases, table-cloths, towels, napkins; some feminine clothing; some shirts, collars, underwear, sox that were unmistakably Coons’s. I thanked Philo while running back to my machine.

Back in Sacramento again, McClump was waiting for me at the garage where I had hired the car.

“Registered at the hotel on June fifteenth, rented the office on the sixteenth. I think he’s in the hotel now,” he greeted me.

We hurried around the block to the Garden Hotel.

“Mr. Handerson went out a minute or two ago,” the night clerk told us. “He seemed to be in a hurry.”

“Know where he keeps his car?”

“In the hotel garage around the corner.”

We were within two pavements of the garage, when Handerson’s automobile shot out and turned up the street.

“Oh, Mr. Handerson!” I cried, trying to keep my voice level and smooth.

He stepped on the gas and streaked away from us.

“Want him?” McClump asked; and, at my nod, stopped a passing roadster by the simple expedient of stepping in front of it.

We climbed aboard, McClump flashed his star at the bewildered driver, and pointed out Handerson’s dwindling tail-light. After he had persuaded himself that he wasn’t being boarded by a couple of bandits, the commandeered driver did his best, and we picked up Handerson’s tail-light after two or three turnings, and closed in on him—though his machine was going at a good clip.

By the time we reached the outskirts of the city, we had crawled up to within safe shooting distance, and I sent a bullet over the fleeing man’s head. Thus encouraged, he managed to get a little more speed out of his car; but we were definitely overhauling him now.

Just at the wrong minute Handerson decided to look over his shoulder at us—an unevenness in the road twisted his wheels—his machine swayed—skidded—went over on its side. Almost immediately, from the heart of the tangle, came a flash and a bullet moaned past my ear. Another. And then, while I was still hunting for something to shoot at in the pile of junk we were drawing down upon, McClump’s ancient and battered revolver roared in my other ear.

Handerson was dead when we got to him—McClump’s bullet had taken him over one eye.

McClump spoke to me over the body.

“I ain’t an inquisitive sort of fellow, but I hope you don’t mind telling me why I shot this lad.”

“Because he was Thornburgh.”

He didn’t say anything for about five minutes. Then: “I reckon that’s right. How’d you guess it?”

We were sitting beside the wreckage now, waiting for the police that we had sent our commandeered chauffeur to phone for.

“He had to be,” I said, “when you think it all over. Funny we didn’t hit on it before! All that stuff we were told about Thornburgh had a fishy sound. Whiskers and an unknown profession, immaculate and working on a mysterious invention, very secretive and born in San Francisco—where the fire wiped out all the old records—just the sort of fake that could be cooked up easily.

“Then nobody but the Coonses, Evelyn Trowbridge and Handerson ever saw him except between the tenth of May and the middle of June, when he bought the house. The Coonses and the Trowbridge woman were tied up together in this affair somehow, we knew—so that left only Handerson to consider. You had told me he came to Sacramento sometime early this summer—and the dates you got tonight show that he didn’t come until after Thornburgh had bought his house. All right! Now compare Handerson with the descriptions we got of Thornburgh.

“Both are about the same size and age, and with the same color hair. The differences are all things that can be manufactured—clothes, a little sunburn, and a month’s growth of beard, along with a little acting, would do the trick. Tonight I went out to Tavender and took a look at the last batch of laundry, and there wasn’t any that didn’t fit the Coonses—and none of the bills all the way back were large enough for Thornburgh to have been as careful about his clothes as we were told he was.”

“It must be great to be a detective!” McClump grinned as the police ambulance came up and began disgorging policemen. “I reckon somebody must have tipped Handerson off that I was asking about him this evening.” And then, regretfully: “So we ain’t going to hang them folks for murder after all.”

“No, but we oughtn’t have any trouble convicting them of arson plus conspiracy to defraud, and anything else that the Prosecuting Attorney can think up.”

Black Mask, 1 October 1923

From the Author of “Arson Plus”

I’m glad you liked “Arson Plus”—it cost me gallons of sweat and acres of chewed finger nails! It went along nicely until I tried to bring it to an end—then it was hell-bent on running two or three thousand words further; but I finally fought it into reasonable length.

This detective of mine: I didn’t deliberately keep him nameless, but he got through “Slippery Fingers” and “Arson Plus” without needing one, so I suppose I may as well let him run along that way. I’m not sure that he’s entitled to a name, anyhow. He’s more or less of a type: the private detective who oftenest is successful: neither the derby-hatted and broad-toed blockhead of one school of fiction, nor the all-knowing, infallible genius of another. I’ve worked with several of him.

Apropos of Charles Somerville’s excellent article on capital punishment in the June 15th issue: under a law passed about two years ago, Nevada uses lethal gas for executions. The condemned man is placed in the lethal chamber during the week set by the court for his death. The gas is turned on while the condemned is asleep, the warden selecting the night of the week

Dashiell Hammett

San Francisco, Cal.

[1] “The Vicious Circle” is a story without a detective published in the 15 June 1923 issue of Black Mask.

CROOKED SOULS

Black Mask, 1 October 1923

We’ve all seen the modern girl. She’s a rare bird and here she is in all her glory—if that’s what it is. A good detective yarn, this, with lots of action and some real people. Go to it.

Harvey Gatewood had issued orders that I was to be admitted as soon as I arrived, so it only took me a little less than fifteen minutes to thread my way past the door-keepers, office boys, and secretaries who filled up most of the space between the Gatewood Lumber Corporation’s front door and the president’s private office. His office was large, all mahogany and bronze and green plush, with a mahogany desk as big as a bed in the center of the floor.

Gatewood, leaning across the desk, began to bark at me as soon as the obsequious clerk who had bowed me in bowed himself out.

“My daughter was kidnapped last night! I want the … that did it if it takes every cent I got!”

“Tell me about it,” I suggested, drawing up the chair that he hadn’t thought to offer me.

But he wanted results, it seemed, and not questions, and so I wasted nearly an hour getting information that he could have given me in fifteen minutes.

He’s a big bruiser of a man, something over two hundred pounds of hard red flesh, and a czar from the top of his bullet head to the toes of his shoes that would have been at least number twelves if they hadn’t been made to measure.

He had made his several millions by sandbagging everybody that stood in his way, and the rage that he’s burning up with now doesn’t make him any easier to deal with.

His wicked jaw is sticking out like a knob of granite and his eyes are filmed with blood—he’s in a lovely frame of mind. For a while it looks as if the Continental Detective Agency is going to lose a client; because I’ve made up my mind that he’s going to tell me all I want to know, or I’m going to chuck up the job. But finally I got the story out of him.

His daughter Audrey had left their house on Clay street at about seven o’clock the preceding evening, telling her maid that she was going for a walk. She had not returned that night—though Gatewood had not known that until after he had read the letter that came this morning.

The letter had been from someone who said that she had been kidnapped. It demanded fifty thousand dollars for her release; and instructed Gatewood to get the money ready in hundred dollar bills, so that there might be no delay when he is told in what manner it is to be paid over to his daughter’s captors. As proof that the demand was not a hoax, a lock of the girl’s hair, a ring she always wore, and a brief note from her, asking her father to comply with the demands, had been enclosed.

Gatewood had received the letter at his office, and had telephoned to his house immediately. He had been told that the girl’s bed had not been slept in the previous night, and that none of the servants had seen her since she started out for her walk. He had then notified the police, turning the letter over to them; and, a few minutes later, he had decided to employ private detectives also.

“Now,” he burst out, after I had wormed these things out of him, and he had told me that he knew nothing of his daughter’s associates or habits, “go ahead and do something! I’m not paying you to sit around and talk about it!”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Me? I’m going to put those … behind the bars if it takes every cent I’ve got in the world!”

“Sure! But first you can get that fifty thousand ready, so you can give it to them when they ask for it.”

He clicked his jaw shut and thrust his face into mine.

“I’ve never been clubbed into doing anything in my life! And I’m too old to start now!” he said. “I’m going to call these people’s bluff!”

“That’s going to make it lovely for your daughter. But, aside from what it’ll do to her, it’s the wrong play. Fifty thousand isn’t a whole lot to you, and paying it over will give us two chances that we haven’t got now. One when the payment is made—a chance to either nab whoever comes for it or get a line on them. And the other when your daughter is returned. No matter how careful they are it’s a cinch that she’ll be able to tell us something that will help us grab them.”

He shook his head angrily, and I was tired of arguing with him. So I left him, hoping that he’d see the wisdom of the course I had advised before too late.

At the Gatewood residence I found butlers, second men, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, upstairs girls, downstairs girls, and a raft of miscellaneous flunkies—he had enough servants to run a hotel.

What they told me amounted to this: The girl had not received a phone call, note by messenger, or telegram—the time-honored devices for luring a victim out to a murder or abduction—before she left the house. She had told her maid that she would be back within an hour or two; but the maid had not been alarmed when her mistress failed to return all that night.

Audrey was the only child, and since her mother’s death she had come and gone to suit herself. She and her father didn’t hit it off very well together—their natures were too much alike, I gathered—and he never knew where she was; and there was nothing unusual about her remaining away all night, as she seldom bothered to leave word when she was going to stay overnight with friends.

She was nineteen years old, but looked several years older; about five feet five inches tall, and slender. She had blue eyes, brown hair,—very thick and long,—was pale and very nervous. Her photographs, of which I took a handful, showed that her eyes were large, her nose small and regular, and her chin obstinately pointed.

She was not beautiful, but in the one photograph where a smile had wiped off the sullenness of her mouth, she was at least pretty.

When she left the house she had worn a light tweed skirt and jacket with a London tailor’s labels in them, a buff silk shirtwaist with stripes a shade darker, brown wool stockings, low-heeled brown oxfords, and an untrimmed grey felt hat.

I went up to her rooms—she had three on the third floor—and looked through all her stuff. I found nearly a bushel of photographs of men, boys, and girls; and a great stack of letters of varying degrees of intimacy, signed with a wide assortment of names and nicknames. I made notes of all the addresses I found.

Nothing there seemed to have any bearing on her abduction, but there was a chance that one of the names and addresses might be of someone who had served as a decoy. Also, some of her friends might be able to tell us something of value.

I dropped in at the Agency and distributed the names and addresses among the three operatives who were idle, sending them out to see what they could dig up.

Then I reached the police detectives who were working on the case—O’Gar and Thode—by telephone, and went down to the Hall of Justice to meet them. Lusk, a post office inspector, was also there. We turned the job around and around, looking at it from every angle, but not getting very far. We were all agreed, however, that we couldn’t take a chance on any publicity, or work in the open, until the girl was safe.

They had had a worse time with Gatewood than I—he had wanted to put the whole thing in the newspapers, with the offer of a reward, photographs and all. Of course, Gatewood was right in claiming that this was the most effective way of catching the kidnappers—but it would have been tough on his daughter if her captors happened to be persons of sufficiently hardened character. And kidnappers as a rule aren’t lambs.

I looked at the letter they had sent. It was printed with pencil on ruled paper of the kind that is sold in pads by every stationery dealer in the world. The envelope was just as common, also addressed in pencil, and post-marked “San Francisco, September 20, 9 P.M.” That was the night she had been seized.

The letter reads:

SIR:

WE HAVE YOUR CHARMING DAUGHTER AND PLACE A VALUE OF $50,000 UPON HER. YOU WILL GET THE MONEY READY IN $100 BILLS AT ONCE SO THERE WILL BE NO DELAY WHEN WE TELL YOU HOW IT IS TO BE PAID OVER TO US.

WE BEG TO ASSURE YOU THAT THINGS WILL GO BADLY WITH YOUR DAUGHTER SHOULD YOU NOT DO AS YOU ARE TOLD, OR SHOULD YOU BRING THE POLICE INTO THIS MATTER, OR SHOULD YOU DO ANYTHING FOOLISH.

$50,000 IS ONLY A SMALL FRACTION OF WHAT YOU STOLE WHILE WE WERE LIVING IN MUD AND BLOOD IN FRANCE FOR YOU, AND WE MEAN TO GET THAT MUCH OR …… !

THREE.

A peculiar note in several ways. They are usually written with a great pretense of partial illiterateness. Almost always there’s an attempt to lead suspicion astray. Perhaps the ex-service stuff was there for that purpose … or perhaps not.

Then there was a postscript:

WE KNOW A CHINAMAN WHO WILL BUY HER EVEN AFTER WE ARE THROUGH WITH HER—IN CASE YOU WON’T LISTEN TO REASON.

The letter from the girl was written jerkily on the same kind of paper, apparently with the same pencil.

Daddy—

Please do as they ask! I am so afraid—

Audrey

A door at the other end of the room opened, and a head came through.

“O’Gar! Thode! Gatewood just called up. Get up to his office right away!”

The four of us tumbled out of the Hall of Justice and into a machine.

Gatewood was pacing his office like a maniac when we pushed aside enough hirelings to get to him. His face was hot with blood and his eyes had an insane glare in them.

“She just phoned me!” he cried thickly, when he saw us.

It took a minute or two to get him calm enough to tell us about it.

“She called me on the phone. Said, ‘Oh, daddy! Do something! I can’t stand this—they’re killing me!’ I asked her if she knew where she was, and she said, ‘No, but I can see Twin Peaks from here. There’s three men and a woman, and—’ And then I heard a man curse, and a sound as if he had struck her, and the phone went dead. I tried to get central to give me the number, but she couldn’t! It’s a damned outrage the way the telephone system is run. We pay enough for service, God knows, and we …”

O’Gar scratched his head and turned away from Gatewood.

“In sight of Twin Peaks! There are hundreds of houses that are!”

Gatewood meanwhile had finished denouncing the telephone company and was pounding on his desk with a paperweight to attract our attention.

“Have you people done anything at all?” he demanded.

I answered him with another question: “Have you got the money ready?”

“No,” he said, “I won’t be held up by anybody!”

But he said it mechanically, without his usual conviction—the talk with his daughter had shaken him out of some of his stubbornness. He was thinking of her safety a little now instead of altogether of his own fighting spirit.

We went at him hammer and tongs for a few minutes, and after a while he sent a clerk out for the money.

We split up the field then. Thode was to take some men from headquarters and see what he could find in the Twin Peaks end of town; but we weren’t very optimistic over the prospects there—the territory was too large.

Lusk and O’Gar were to carefully mark the bills that the clerk brought from the bank, and then stick as close to Gatewood as they could without attracting attention. I was to go out to Gatewood’s house and stay there.

The abductors had plainly instructed Gatewood to get the money ready immediately so that they could arrange to get it on short notice—not giving him time to communicate with anyone or make any plans.

Gatewood was to get hold of the newspapers, give them the whole story, with the $10,000 reward he was offering for the abductors’ capture, to be published as soon as the girl was safe—so that we would get the help of publicity at the earliest moment possible without jeopardizing the girl.

The police in all the neighboring towns had already been notified—that had been done before the girl’s phone message had assured us that she was held in San Francisco.

Nothing happened at the Gatewood residence all that evening. Harvey Gatewood came home early; and after dinner he paced his library floor and drank whiskey until bedtime, demanding every few minutes that we, the detectives in the case, do something besides sit around like a lot of damned mummies. O’Gar, Lusk and Thode were out in the street, keeping an eye on the house and neighborhood.

At midnight Harvey Gatewood went to bed. I declined a bed in favor of the library couch, which I dragged over beside the telephone, an extension of which was in Gatewood’s bedroom.

At two-thirty the bell rang. I listened in while Gatewood talked from his bed.

A man’s voice, crisp and curt: “Gatewood?”

“Yes.”

“Got the dough?”

“Yes.”

Gatewood’s voice was thick and blurred—I could imagine the boiling that was going on inside him.

“Good!” came the brisk voice. “Put a piece of paper around it, and leave the house with it, right away! Walk down Clay street, keeping on the same side as your house. Don’t walk too fast and keep walking. If everything’s all right, and there’s no elbows tagging along, somebody’ll come up to you between your house and the water-front. They’ll have a handkerchief up to their face for a second, and then they’ll let it fall to the ground.

“When you see that, you’ll lay the money on the pavement, turn around and walk back to your house. If the money isn’t marked, and you don’t try any fancy tricks, you’ll get your daughter back in an hour or two. If you try to pull anything—remember what we wrote you about the Chink! Got it straight?”

Gatewood sputtered something that was meant for an affirmative, and the telephone clicked silent.

I didn’t waste any of my precious time tracing the call—it would be from a public telephone, I knew—but yelled up the stairs to Gatewood:

“You do as you were told, and don’t try any foolishness!”

Then I ran out into the early morning air to find the police detectives and the post office inspector.

They had been joined by two plainclothes men, and had two automobiles waiting. I told them what the situation was, and we laid hurried plans.

O’Gar was to drive in one of the machines down Sacramento street, and Thode, in the other, down Washington street. These streets parallel Clay, one on each side. They were to drive slowly, keeping pace with Gatewood, and stopping at each cross street to see that he passed.

When he failed to cross within a reasonable time they were to turn up to Clay street—and their actions from then on would have to be guided by chance and their own wits.

Lusk was to wander along a block or two ahead of Gatewood, on the opposite side of the street, pretending to be mildly intoxicated, and keeping his eyes and ears open.

I was to shadow Gatewood down the street, with one of the plainclothes men behind me. The other plainclothes man was to turn in a call at headquarters for every available man to be sent to Clay street. They would arrive too late, of course, and as likely as not it would take them some time to find us; but we had no way of knowing what was going to turn up before the night was over.

Our plan was sketchy enough, but it was the best we could do—we were afraid to grab whoever got the money from Gatewood. The girl’s talk with her father that afternoon had sounded too much as if her captors were desperate for us to take any chances on going after them rough-shod until she was out of their hands.

We had hardly finished our plans when Gatewood, wearing a heavy overcoat, left his house and turned down the street.

Farther down, Lusk, weaving along, talking to himself, was almost invisible in the shadows. There was no one else in sight. That meant that I had to give Gatewood at least two blocks’ lead, so that the man who came for the money wouldn’t tumble to me. One of the plainclothes men was half a block behind me, on the other side of the street.

Two blocks down we walked, and then a little chunky man in a derby hat came into sight. He passed Gatewood, passed me, went on.

Three blocks more.

A touring-car, large, black, powerfully engined, and with lowered curtains, came from the rear, passed us, went on. Possibly a scout! I scrawled its license number down on my pad without taking my hand out of my overcoat pocket.

Another three blocks.

A policeman passed, strolling along in ignorance of the game being played under his nose; and then a taxicab with a single male passenger. I wrote down its license number.

Four blocks with no one in sight ahead of me but Gatewood—I couldn’t see Lusk any more.

Just ahead of Gatewood a man stepped out of a black doorway—turned around—called up to a window for someone to come down and open the door for him.

We went on.

Coming from nowhere, a woman stood on the sidewalk fifty feet ahead of Gatewood, a handkerchief to her face. It fluttered to the pavement.

Gatewood stopped, standing stiff-legged. I could see his right hand come up, lifting the side of the overcoat in which it was pocketed—and I knew the hand was gripped around a pistol.

For perhaps half a minute he stood like a statue. Then his left hand came out of his pocket, and the bundle of money fell to the sidewalk in front of him, where it made a bright blur in the darkness. Gatewood turned abruptly, and began to retrace his steps homeward.

The woman had recovered her handkerchief. Now she ran to the bundle, picked it up, and scuttled to the black mouth of an alley, a few feet distant—a rather tall woman, bent, and in dark clothes from head to feet.

In the black mouth of the alley she vanished.

I had been compelled to slow up while Gatewood and the woman stood facing each other, and I was more than a block away now. As soon as the woman disappeared I took a chance, and started pounding my rubber soles against the pavement.

The alley was empty when I reached it.

It ran all the way through to the next street, but I knew that the woman couldn’t have reached the other end before I got to this one. I carry a lot of weight these days, but I can still step a block or two in good time. Along both sides of the alley were the rears of apartment buildings, each with its back door looking blankly, secretively at me.

The plainclothes man who had been trailing behind me came up, then O’Gar and Thode in their machines, and soon, Lusk. O’Gar and Thode rode off immediately to wind through the neighboring streets, hunting for the woman. Lusk and the plainclothes man each planted himself on a corner from which two of the streets enclosing the block could be watched.

I went through the alley, hunting vainly for an unlocked door, an open window, a fire-escape that would show recent use—any of the signs that a hurried departure from the alley might leave.

Nothing!

O’Gar came back shortly with some reinforcements from headquarters that he had picked up, and Gatewood.

Gatewood was burning.

“Bungled the damn thing again! I won’t pay your agency a nickel, and I’ll see that some of these so-called detectives get put back in a uniform and set to walking beats!”

“What’d the woman look like?” I asked him.

“I don’t know! I thought you were hanging around to take care of her! She was old and bent, kind of, I guess, but I couldn’t see her face for her veil. I don’t know! What the hell were you men doing? It’s a damned outrage the way …”

I finally got him quieted down and took him home, leaving the city men to keep the neighborhood under surveillance. There was fourteen or fifteen of them on the job now, and every shadow held at least one.

The girl would naturally head for home as soon as she was released and I wanted to be there to pump her. There was an excellent chance of catching her abductors before they got very far if she could tell us anything at all about them.

Home, Gatewood went up against the whiskey bottle again, while I kept one ear cocked at the telephone and the other at the front door. O’Gar or Thode phoned every half hour or so to ask if we’d heard from the girl. They had still found nothing.

At nine o’clock they, with Lusk, arrived at the house. The woman in black had turned out to be a man, and had gotten away.

In the rear of one of the apartment buildings that touched the alley—just a foot or so within the back-door—they found a woman’s skirt, long coat, hat and veil—all black. Investigating the occupants of the house, they had learned that an apartment had been rented to a young man named Leighton three days before.

Leighton was not at home when they went up to his apartment. His rooms held a lot of cold cigarette butts, and an empty bottle, and nothing else that had not been there when he rented it.

The inference was clear: he had rented the apartment so that he might have access to the building. Wearing woman’s clothes over his own, he had gone out of the back door—leaving it unlatched behind him—to meet Gatewood.

Then he had run back into the building, discarded his disguise, and hurried through the building, out the front door, and away before we had our feeble net around the block; perhaps dodging into dark doorways here and there to avoid O’Gar and Thode in their automobiles.

Leighton, it seemed, was a man of about thirty, slender, about five feet eight or nine inches tall, with dark hair and eyes; rather good-looking, and well-dressed, on the two occasions when people living in the building had seen him, in a brown suit and a light brown felt hat.

There was no possibility, according to the opinions of both of the detectives and the post office inspector, that the girl might have been held, even temporarily, in Leighton’s apartment.

Ten o’clock came, and no word from the girl.

Gatewood had lost his domineering bull-headedness by now and was breaking up. The suspense was getting him, and the liquor he had put away wasn’t helping him. I didn’t like him either personally or by reputation, but at that I felt sorry for him this morning.

I talked to the agency over the phone and got the reports of the operatives who had been looking up Audrey’s friends. The last person to see her had been an Agnes Dangerfield, who had seen her walking down Market street near Sixth, alone, on the night of her abduction—some time between 8:15 and 8:45. Audrey had been too far away for the Dangerfield girl to speak to her.

For the rest, the boys had learned nothing except that Audrey was a wild, spoiled youngster who hadn’t shown any great care in selecting her friends—just the sort of girl who could easily fall into the hands of a mob of highbinders!

Noon struck. No sign of the girl. We told the newspapers to turn loose the story, with the added developments of the past few hours.

Gatewood was broken; he sat with his head in his hands, looking at nothing. Just before I left to follow a hunch I had, he looked up at me, and I’d never have recognized him if I hadn’t seen the change take place.

“What do you think is keeping her away?” he asked.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was beginning to suspect, now that the money had been paid and she had failed to show up. So I stalled with some vague assurances, and left.

I caught a street-car and dropped off down in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores, going to all the women’s wear departments from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man—perhaps one answering Leighton’s description—had been buying clothes that would fit Audrey Gatewood within the past couple days.

Failing to get any results, I turned the rest of the local stores over to one of the boys from the agency, and went across the bay to canvass the Oakland stores.

At the first one I got action. A man who might easily have been Leighton had been in the day before, buying clothes that could easily fit Audrey. He had bought lots of them, everything from lingerie to a cloak, and—my luck was hitting on all its cylinders—had had his purchases delivered to T. Offord, at an address on Fourteenth street.

At the Fourteenth street address, an apartment house, I found Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Offord’s names under the vestibule telephone for apartment 202.

I had just found them when the front door opened and a stout, middle-aged woman in a gingham house-dress came out. She looked at me a bit curiously, so I asked:

“Do you know where I can find the manager?”

“I’m the manager,” she said.

I handed her a card and stepped indoors with her.

“I’m from the bonding department of the North American Casualty Company”—a repetition of the lie that was printed on the card I had given her—“and a bond for Mr. Offord has been applied for. Is he all right so far as you know?” With the slightly apologetic air of one going through with a necessary but not too important formality.

She frowned.

“A bond? That’s funny! He is going away tomorrow.”

“Well, I can’t say what the bond is for,” I said lightly. “We investigators just get the names and addresses. It may be for his present employer, or perhaps the man he is going to work for wherever he’s going has applied for it. Or some firms have us look up prospective employees before they hire them, just to be safe.”

“Mr. Offord, so far as I know, is a very nice young man,” she said, “but he has been here only a week.”

“Not staying long, then?”

“No. They came here from Denver, intending to stay, but the low altitude doesn’t agree with Mrs. Offord, so they are going back.”

“Are you sure they came from Denver?”

“Well,” she said, “they told me they did.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Only the two of them; they’re young people.”

“Well, how do they impress you?” I asked, trying to get the impression that I thought her a woman of shrewd judgment over.

“They seem to be a very nice young couple. You’d hardly know they were in their apartment most of the time, they are so quiet. I am sorry they can’t stay.”

“Do they go out much?”

“I really don’t know. They have their keys, and unless I should happen to pass them going in or out I’d never see them.”

“Then, as a matter of fact, you couldn’t say whether they stayed away all night some nights or not. Could you?”

She eyed me doubtfully—I was stepping way over my pretext now, but I didn’t think it mattered—and shook her head.

“No, I couldn’t say.”

“They have many visitors?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Offord is not—”

She broke off as a man came in quietly from the street, brushed past me, and started to mount the steps to the second floor.

“Oh, dear!” she whispered. “I hope he didn’t hear me talking about him. That’s Mr. Offord.”

A slender man in brown, with a light brown hat—Leighton perhaps.

I hadn’t seen anything of him except his back, nor he anything except mine. I watched him as he climbed the stairs. If he had heard the manager mention his name he would use the turn at the head of the stairs to sneak a look at me.

He did. I kept my face stolid, but I knew him. He was “Penny” Quayle, a con man who had been active in the East four or five years before. His face was as expressionless as mine. But he knew me.

A door on the second floor shut. I left the manager and started for the stairs.

“I think I’ll go up and talk to him,” I told her.

Coming silently to the door of apartment 202, I listened. Not a sound. This was no time for hesitation. I pressed the bell-button.

As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand times more vicious, came three pistol shots. And waist-high in the door of apartment 202 were three bullet holes.

The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn’t learned years ago to stand to one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls.

Inside the apartment sounded a man’s voice, sharp, commanding.

“Cut it, kid! For God’s sake, not that!”

A woman’s voice, shrill, bitter, spiteful screaming blasphemies.

Two more bullets came through the door.

“Stop! No! No!” The man’s voice had a note of fear in it now.

The woman’s voice, cursing hotly. A scuffle. A shot that didn’t hit the door.

I hurled my foot against the door, near the knob, and the lock broke away.

On the floor of the room, a man—Quayle—and a woman were tussling. He was bending over her, holding her wrists, trying to keep her down. A smoking automatic pistol was in one of her hands. I got to it in a jump and tore it loose.

“That’s enough!” I called to them when I was planted. “Get up and receive company.”

Quayle released his antagonist’s wrists, whereupon she struck at his eyes with curved, sharp-nailed fingers, tearing his cheek open. He scrambled away from her on hands and knees, and both of them got to their feet.

He sat down on a chair immediately, panting and wiping his bleeding cheek with a handkerchief.

She stood, hands on hips, in the center of the room, glaring at me.

“I suppose,” she spat, “you think you’ve raised hell!”

I laughed—I could afford to.

“If your father is in his right mind,” I told her, “he’ll do it with a razor strop when he gets you home again. A fine joke you picked out to play on him!”

“If you’d been tied to him as long as I have, and had been bullied and held down as much, I guess you’d do most anything to get enough money so that you could go away and live your own life.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Remembering some of the business methods Harvey Gatewood had used—particularly some of his war contracts that the Department of Justice was still investigating—I suppose the worst that could be said about Audrey was that she was her father’s own daughter.

“How’d you rap to it? ” Quayle asked me, politely.

“Several ways,” I said. “First, I’m a little doubtful about grown persons being kidnapped in cities. Maybe it really happens sometimes, but at least nine-tenths of the cases you hear about are fakes. Second, one of Audrey’s friends saw her on Market street between 8:15 and 8:45 the night she disappeared; and your letter to Gatewood was post-marked 9 P.M. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it, even if it had to miss the first morning delivery. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here?”

Quayle nodded.

“Then third,” I went on, “there was that phone call of hers. She knew it took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to get her father on the wire at the office. If time had been as valuable as it would have been if she had gotten to a phone while imprisoned, she’d have told her story to the first person she got hold of—the phone girl, most likely. So that made it look as if, besides wanting to throw out that Twin Peaks line, she wanted to stir the old man out of his bull-headedness.

“When she failed to show up after the money was paid I figured it was a sure bet that she had kidnapped herself. I knew that if she came back home after faking this thing we’d find it out before we’d talked to her very long—and I figured she knew that too, and would stay away.

“The rest was easy, as I got some good breaks. We knew a man was working with her after we found the woman’s clothes you left behind, and I took a chance on there being no one else in it. Then I figured she’d need clothes —she couldn’t have taken any from home without tipping her mitt—and there was an even chance that she hadn’t laid in a stock beforehand. She’s got too many girl friends of the sort that do a lot of shopping to make it safe for her to risk showing herself in stores. Maybe, then, the man would buy what she needed for her. And it turned out that he did, and that he was too lazy to carry away his purchases, or perhaps there was too many of them, and so he had them sent out. That’s the story.”

Quayle nodded again.

“I was damned careless,” he said, and then, jerking a contemptuous thumb toward the girl. “But what can you expect? She’s had a skin full of hop ever since we started. Took all my time and attention keeping her from running wild and gumming the works. Just now was a sample—I told her you were coming up and she goes crazy and tries to add your corpse to the wreck!”

The Gatewood reunion took place in the office of the captain of inspectors, on the second floor of the Oakland City Hall, and it was a merry little party. For an hour it was a toss-up whether Harvey Gatewood would die of apoplexy, strangle his daughter, or send her off to the state reformatory until she was of age. But Audrey licked him. Besides being a chip off the old block, she was young enough to be careless of consequences, while her father, for all his bullheadedness, had had some caution hammered into him.

The card she beat him with was a threat of spilling everything she knew about him to the newspapers, and at least one of the San Francisco papers had been trying to get his scalp for years. I don’t know what she had on him, and I don’t think he was any too sure himself; but, with his war contracts even then being investigated by the Department of Justice, he couldn’t afford to take a chance. There was no doubt at all that she would have done as she threatened.

And so, together, they left for home, sweating hate for each other at every pore.

We took Quayle upstairs and put him in a cell, but he was too experienced to let that worry him. He knew that if the girl was to be spared, he himself couldn’t very easily be convicted of anything.

SLIPPERY FINGERS

Black Mask, 15 October 1923

Dashiell Hammett writing as Peter Collinson

You’ll have the time of your life trying to solve this crime before you get to the end of the story. You’ll think some of the characters don’t act logically, but when you figure it out afterward you’ll decide they were all pretty wise.

“You are already familiar, of course, with the particulars of my father’s—ah—death?”

“The papers are full of it, and have been for three days,” I said, “and I’ve read them; but I’ll have to have the whole story first-hand.”

“There isn’t very much to tell.”

This Frederick Grover was a short, slender man of something under thirty years, and dressed like a picture out of Vanity Fair. His almost girlish features and voice did nothing to make him more impressive, but I began to forget these things after a few minutes. He wasn’t a sap. I knew that downtown, where he was rapidly building up a large and lively business in stocks and bonds without calling for too much help from his father’s millions, he was considered a shrewd article; and I wasn’t surprised later when Benny Forman, who ought to know, told me that Frederick Grover was the best poker player west of Chicago. He was a cool, well-balanced, quick-thinking little man.

“Father has lived here alone with the servants since mother’s death, two years ago,” he went on. “I am married, you know, and live in town. Last Saturday evening he dismissed Barton—Barton was his butler-valet, and had been with father for quite a few years—at a little after nine, saying that he did not want to be disturbed during the evening.

“Father was here in the library at the time, looking through some papers. The servants’ rooms are in the rear, and none of the servants seem to have heard anything during the night.

“At seven-thirty the following morning—Sunday—Barton found father lying on the floor, just to the right of where you are sitting, dead, stabbed in the throat with the brass paper-knife that was always kept on the table here. The front door was ajar.

“The police found bloody finger-prints on the knife, the table, and the front door; but so far they have not found the man who left the prints, which is why I am employing your agency. The physician who came with the police placed the time of father’s death at between eleven o’clock and midnight.

“Later, on Monday, we learned that father had drawn $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills from the bank Saturday morning. No trace of the money has been found. My finger-prints, as well as the servants’, were compared with the ones found by the police, but there was no similarity. I think that is all.”

“Do you know of any enemies your father had?”

He shook his head.

“I know of none, though he may have had them. You see, I really didn’t know my father very well. He was a very reticent man and, until his retirement, about five years ago, he spent most of his time in South America, where most of his mining interests were. He may have had dozens of enemies, though Barton—who probably knew more about him than anyone—seems to know of no one who hated father enough to kill him.”

“How about relatives?”

“I was his heir and only child, if that is what you are getting at. So far as I know he had no other living relatives.”

“I’ll talk to the servants,” I said.

The maid and the cook could tell me nothing, and I learned very little more from Barton. He had been with Henry Grover since 1912, had been with him in Yunnan, Peru, Mexico, and Central America, but apparently he knew little or nothing of his master’s business or acquaintances.

He said that Grover had not seemed excited or worried on the night of the murder, and that nearly every night Grover dismissed him at about the same time, with orders that he be not disturbed; so no importance was to be attached to that part of it. He knew of no one with whom Grover had communicated during the day, and he had not seen the money Grover had drawn from the bank.

I made a quick inspection of the house and grounds, not expecting to find anything; and I didn’t. Half the jobs that come to a private detective are like this one: three or four days—and often as many weeks—have passed since the crime was committed. The police work on the job until they are stumped; then the injured party calls in a private sleuth, dumps him down on a trail that is old and cold and badly trampled, and expects—Oh, well! I picked out this way of making a living, so …

I looked through Grover’s papers—he had a safe and a desk full of them—but didn’t find anything to get excited about. They were mostly columns of figures.

“I’m going to send an accountant out here to go over your father’s books,” I told Frederick Grover. “Give him everything he asks for, and fix it up with the bank so they’ll help him.”

I caught a street-car and went back to town, called at Ned Root’s office, and headed him out toward Grover’s. Ned is a human adding machine with educated eyes, ears, and nose. He can spot a kink in a set of books farther than I can see the covers.

“Keep digging until you find something, Ned, and you can charge Grover whatever you like. Give me something to work on—quick!”

The murder had all the earmarks of one that had grown out of blackmail, though there was—there always is—a chance that it might have been something else. But it didn’t look like the work of an enemy or a burglar: either of them would have packed his weapon with him, would not have trusted to finding it on the grounds. Of course, if Frederick Grover, or one of the servants, had killed Henry Grover … but the finger-prints said “No.”

Just to play safe, I put in a few hours getting a line on Frederick. He had been at a ball on the night of the murder; he had never, so far as I could learn, quarreled with his father; his father was liberal with him, giving him everything he wanted; and Frederick was taking in more money in his brokerage office than he was spending. No motive for a murder appeared on the surface there.

At the city detective bureau I hunted up the police sleuths who had been assigned to the murder; Marty O’Hara and George Dean. It didn’t take them long to tell me what they knew about it. Whoever had made the bloody finger-prints was not known to the police here: they had not found the prints in their files. The classifications had been broadcast to every large city in the country, but with no results so far.

A house four blocks from Grover’s had been robbed on the night of the murder, and there was a slim chance that the same man might have been responsible for both jobs. But the burglary had occurred after one o’clock in the morning, which made the connection look not so good. A burglar who had killed a man, and perhaps picked up $10,000 in the bargain, wouldn’t be likely to turn his hand to another job right away.

I looked at the paper-knife with which Grover had been killed, and at the photographs of the bloody prints, but they couldn’t help me much just now. There seemed to be nothing to do but get out and dig around until I turned up something somewhere.

Then the door opened, and Joseph Clane was ushered into the room where O’Hara, Dean and I were talking.

Clane was a hard-bitten citizen, for all his prosperous look; fifty or fifty-five, I’d say, with eyes, mouth and jaw that held plenty of humor but none of what is sometimes called the milk of human kindness.

He was a big man, beefy, and all dressed up in a tight-fitting checkered suit, fawn-colored hat, patent-leather shoes with buff uppers, and the rest of the things that go with that sort of combination. He had a harsh voice that was as empty of expression as his hard red face, and he held his body stiffly, as if he was afraid the buttons on his too-tight clothes were about to pop off. Even his arms hung woodenly at his sides, with thick fingers that were lifelessly motionless.

He came right to the point. He had been a friend of the murdered man’s, and thought that perhaps what he could tell us would be of value.

He had met Henry Grover—he called him “Henny”—in 1894, in Ontario, where Grover was working a claim: the gold mine that had started the murdered man along the road to wealth. Clane had been employed by Grover as foreman, and the two men had become close friends. A man named Denis Waldeman had a claim adjoining Grover’s and a dispute had arisen over their boundaries. The dispute ran on for some time—the men coming to blows once or twice—but finally Grover seems to have triumphed, for Waldeman suddenly left the country.

Clane’s idea was that if we could find Waldeman we might find Grover’s murderer, for considerable money had been involved in the dispute, and Waldeman was “a mean cuss, for a fact,” and not likely to have forgotten his defeat.

Clane and Grover had kept in touch with each other, corresponding or meeting at irregular intervals, but the murdered man had never said or written anything that would throw a light on his death. Clane, too, had given up mining, and now had a small string of race-horses which occupied all his time.

He was in the city for a rest between racing-meets, had arrived two days before the murder, but had been too busy with his own affairs—he had discharged his trainer and was trying to find another—to call upon his friend. Clane was staying at the Marquis hotel, and would be in the city for a week or ten days longer.

“How come you’ve waited three days before coming to tell us all this?” Dean asked him.

“I wasn’t noways sure I had ought to do it. I wasn’t never sure in my mind but what maybe Henny done for that fellow Waldeman—he disappeared sudden-like. And I didn’t want to do nothing to dirty Henny’s name. But finally I decided to do the right thing. And then there’s another thing: you found some finger-prints in Henny’s house, didn’t you? The newspapers said so.”

“We did.”

“Well, I want you to take mine and match them up. I was out with a girl the night of the murder”—he leered suddenly, boastingly—“all night! And she’s a good girl, got a husband and a lot of folks; and it wouldn’t be right to drag her into this to prove that I wasn’t in Henny’s house when he was killed, in case you’d maybe think I killed him. So I thought I better come down here, tell you all about it, and get you to take my finger-prints, and have it all over with.”

We went up to the identification bureau and had Clane’s prints taken. They were not at all like the murderer’s.

After we pumped Clane dry I went out and sent a telegram to our Toronto office, asking them to get a line on the Waldeman angle. Then I hunted up a couple of boys who eat, sleep, and breathe horse racing. They told me that Clane was well known in racing circles as the owner of a small string of near-horses that ran as irregularly as the stewards would permit.

At the Marquis hotel I got hold of the house detective, who is a helpful chap so long as his hand is kept greased. He verified my information about Clane’s status in the sporting world, and told me that Clane had stayed at the hotel for several days at a time, off and on, within the past couple years.

He tried to trace Clane’s telephone calls for me but—as usual when you want them—the records were jumbled. I arranged to have the girls on the switchboard listen in on any talking he did during the next few days.

Ned Root was waiting for me when I got down to the office the next morning. He had worked on Grover’s accounts all night, and had found enough to give me a start. Within the past year—that was as far back as Ned had gone—Grover had drawn out of his bank-accounts nearly fifty thousand dollars that couldn’t be accounted for; nearly fifty thousand exclusive of the ten thousand he had drawn the day of the murder. Ned gave me the amounts and the dates:

May 6, 1922, $15,000

June 10, 5,000

August 1, 5,000

October 10, 10,000

January 3, 1923, 12,500

Forty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars! Somebody was getting fat off him!

The local managers of the telegraph companies raised the usual howl about respecting their patrons’ privacy, but I got an order from the Prosecuting Attorney and put a clerk at work on the files of each office.

Then I went back to the Marquis hotel and looked at the old registers. Clane had been there from May 4th to 7th, and from October 8th to 15th last year. That checked off two of the dates upon which Grover had made his withdrawals.

I had to wait until nearly six o’clock for my information from the telegraph companies, but it was worth waiting for. On the third of last January Henry Grover had telegraphed $12,500 to Joseph Clane in San Diego. The clerks hadn’t found anything on the other dates I had given them, but I wasn’t at all dissatisfied. I had Joseph Clane fixed as the man who had been getting fat off Grover.

I sent Dick Foley—he is the Agency’s shadow-ace—and Bob Teal—a youngster who will be a world-beater some day—over to Clane’s hotel.

“Plant yourselves in the lobby,” I told them. “I’ll be over in a few minutes to talk to Clane, and I’ll try to bring him down in the lobby where you can get a good look at him. Then I want him shadowed until he shows up at police headquarters tomorrow. I want to know where he goes and who he talks to. And if he spends much time talking to any one person, or their conversation seems very important, I want one of you boys to trail the other man, to see who he is and what he does. If Clane tries to blow town, grab him and have him thrown in the can, but I don’t think he will.”

I gave Dick and Bob time enough to get themselves placed, and then went to the hotel. Clane was out, so I waited. He came in a little after eleven and I went up to his room with him. I didn’t hem-and-haw, but came out cold-turkey:

“All the signs point to Grover’s having been blackmailed. Do you know anything about it?”

“No,” he said.

“Grover drew a lot of money out of his banks at different times. You got some of it, I know, and I suppose you got most of it. What about it?”

He didn’t pretend to be insulted, or even surprised by my talk. He smiled a little grimly, maybe, but as if he thought it the most natural thing in the world—and it was, at that—for me to suspect him.

“I told you that me and Henny were pretty chummy, didn’t I? Well, you ought to know that all us fellows that fool with the bang-tails have our streaks of bad luck. Whenever I’d get up against it I’d hit Henny up for a stake; like at Tiajuana last winter where I got into a flock of bad breaks. Henny lent me twelve or fifteen thousand and I got back on my feet again. I’ve done that often. He ought to have some of my letters and wires in his stuff. If you look through his things you’ll find them.”

I didn’t pretend that I believed him.

“Suppose you drop into police headquarters at nine in the morning and we’ll go over everything with the city dicks,” I told him.

And then, to make my play stronger:

“I wouldn’t make it much later than nine—they might be out looking for you.”

“Uh-huh,” was all the answer I got.

I went back to the Agency and planted myself within reach of a telephone, waiting for word from Dick and Bob. I thought I was sitting pretty. Clane had been blackmailing Grover—I didn’t have a single doubt of that—and I didn’t think he had been very far away when Grover was killed. That woman alibi of his sounded all wrong!

But the bloody finger-prints were not Clane’s—unless the police identification bureau had pulled an awful boner—and the man who had left the prints was the bird I was setting my cap for. Clane had let three days pass between the murder and his appearance at headquarters. The natural explanation for that would be that his partner, the actual murderer, had needed nearly that much time to put himself in the clear.

My present game was simple: I had stirred Clane up with the knowledge that he was still suspected, hoping that he would have to repeat whatever precautions were necessary to protect his accomplice in the first place.

He had taken three days then. I was giving him about nine hours now: time enough to do something, but not too much time, hoping that he would have to hurry things along and that in his haste he would give Dick and Bob a chance to turn up his partner: the owner of the fingers that had smeared blood on the knife, the table, and the door.

At a quarter to one in the morning Dick telephoned that Clane had left the hotel a few minutes behind me, had gone to an apartment house on Polk Street, and was still there.

I went up to Polk Street and joined Dick and Bob. They told me that Clane had gone in apartment number 27, and that the directory in the vestibule showed this apartment was occupied by George Farr. I stuck around with the boys until about two o’clock, when I went home for some sleep.

At seven I was with them again, and was told that our man had not appeared yet. It was a little after eight when he came out and turned down Geary Street, with the boys trailing him, while I went into the apartment house for a talk with the manager. She told me that Farr had been living there for four or five months, lived alone, and was a photographer by trade, with a studio on Market Street.

I went up and rang his bell. He was a husky of thirty or thirty-two with bleary eyes that looked as if they hadn’t had much sleep that night. I didn’t waste any time with him.

“I’m from the Continental Detective Agency and I am interested in Joseph Clane. What do you know about him?”

He was wide awake now.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No,” sullenly.

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

What can you do with a bird like that?

“Farr,” I said, “I want you to go down to headquarters with me.”

He moved like a streak and his sullen manner had me a little off my guard; but I turned my head in time to take the punch above my ear instead of on the chin. At that, it carried me off my feet and I wouldn’t have bet a nickel that my skull wasn’t dented; but luck was with me and I fell across the doorway, holding the door open, and managed to scramble up, stumble through some rooms, and catch one of his feet as it was going through the bathroom window to join its mate on the fire-escape. I got a split lip and a kicked shoulder in the scuffle, but he behaved after a while.

I didn’t stop to look at his stuff—that could be done more regularly later—but put him in a taxicab and took him to the Hall of Justice. I was afraid that if I waited too long Clane would take a run-out on me.

Clane’s mouth fell open when he saw Farr, but neither of them said anything.

I was feeling pretty chirp in spite of my bruises.

“Let’s get this bird’s finger-prints and get it over with,” I said to O’Hara.

Dean was not in.

“And keep an eye on Clane. I think maybe he’ll have another story to tell us in a few minutes.”

We got in the elevator and took our men up to the identification bureau, where we put Farr’s fingers on the pad. Phels—he is the department’s expert—took one look at the results and turned to me.

“Well, what of it?”

“What of what?” I asked.

“This isn’t the man who killed Henry Grover!”

Clane laughed, Farr laughed, O’Hara laughed, and Phels laughed. I didn’t! I stood there and pretended to be thinking, trying to get myself in hand.

“Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?” I blurted, my face a nice, rosy red.

You can tell how badly upset I was by that: it’s plain suicide to say a thing like that to a finger-print expert!

Phels didn’t answer; just looked me up and down.

Clane laughed again, like a crow cawing, and turned his ugly face to me.

“Do you want to take my prints again, Mr. Slick Private Detective?”

“Yeah,” I said, “just that!”

I had to say something.

Clane held his hands out to Phels, who ignored them, speaking to me with heavy sarcasm.

“Better take them yourself this time, so you’ll be sure it’s been done right.”

I was mad clean through—of course it was my own fault—but I was pig-headed enough to go through with anything, particularly anything that would hurt somebody’s feelings; so I said:

“That’s not a bad idea!”

I walked over and took hold of one of Clane’s hands. I’d never taken a finger-print before, but I had seen it done often enough to throw a bluff. I started to ink Clane’s fingers and found that I was holding them wrong—my own fingers were in the way.

Then I came back to earth. The balls of Clane’s fingers were too smooth—or rather, too slick—without the slight clinging feeling that belongs to flesh. I turned his hand over so fast that I nearly upset him and looked at the fingers. I don’t know what I had expected to find but I didn’t find anything—not anything that I could name.

“Phels,” I called, “look here!”

He forgot his injured feelings and bent to look at Clane’s hand.

“I’ll be—” he began, and then the two of us were busy for a few minutes taking Clane down and sitting on him, while O’Hara quieted Farr, who had also gone suddenly into action.

When things were peaceful again Phels examined Clane’s hands carefully, scratching the fingers with a finger-nail.

He jumped up, leaving me to hold Clane, and paying no attention to my, “What is it?” got a cloth and some liquid, and washed the fingers thoroughly. We took his prints again. They matched the bloody ones taken from Grover’s house!

Then we all sat down and had a nice talk.

“I told you about the trouble Henny had with that fellow Waldeman,” Clane began, after he and Farr had decided to come clean: there was nothing else they could do. “And how he won out in the argument because Waldeman disappeared. Well, Henny done for him—shot him one night and buried him—and I saw it. Grover was one bad actor in them days, a tough hombre to tangle with, so I didn’t try to make nothing out of what I knew.

“But after he got older and richer he got soft—a lot of men go like that—and must have begun worrying over it; because when I ran into him in New York accidentally about four years ago it didn’t take me long to learn that he was pretty well tamed, and he told me that he hadn’t been able to forget the look on Waldeman’s face when he drilled him.

“So I took a chance and braced Henny for a couple thousand. I got them easy, and after that, whenever I was flat I either went to him or sent him word, and he always came across. But I was careful not to crowd him too far. I knew what a terror he was in the old days, and I didn’t want to push him into busting loose again.

“But that’s what I did in the end. I ’phoned him Friday that I needed money and he said he’d call me up and let me know where to meet him the next night. He called up around half past nine Saturday night and told me to come out to the house. So I went out there and he was waiting for me on the porch and took me upstairs and gave me the ten thousand. I told him this was the last time I’d ever bother him—I always told him that—it had a good effect on him.

“Naturally I wanted to get away as soon as I had the money but he must have felt sort of talkative for a change, because he kept me there for half an hour or so, gassing about men we used to know up in the province.

“After awhile I began to get nervous. He was getting a look in his eyes like he used to have when he was young. And then all of a sudden he flared up and tied into me. He had me by the throat and was bending me back across the table when my hand touched that brass knife. It was either me or him—so I let him have it where it would do the most good.

“I beat it then and went back to the hotel. The newspapers were full of it next day, and had a whole lot of stuff about bloody finger-prints. That gave me a jolt! I didn’t know nothing about finger-prints, and here I’d left them all over the dump.

“And then I got to worrying over the whole thing, and it seemed like Henny must have my name written down somewheres among his papers, and maybe had saved some of my letters or telegrams—though they were wrote in careful enough language. Anyway I figured the police would want to be asking me some questions sooner or later; and there I’d be with fingers that fit the bloody prints, and nothing for what Farr calls a alibi.

“That’s when I thought of Farr. I had his address and I knew he had been a finger-print sharp in the East, so I decided to take a chance on him. I went to him and told him the whole story and between us we figured out what to do.

“He said he’d dope my fingers, and I was to come here and tell the story we’d fixed up, and have my finger-prints taken, and then I’d be safe no matter what leaked out about me and Henny. So he smeared up the fingers and told me to be careful not to shake hands with anybody or touch anything, and I came down here and everything went like three of a kind.

“Then that little fat guy”—meaning me—“came around to the hotel last night and as good as told me that he thought I had done for Henny and that I better come down here this morning. I beat it for Farr’s right away to see whether I ought to run for it or sit tight, and Farr said, ‘Sit tight!’ So I stayed there all night and he fixed up my hands this morning. That’s my yarn!”

Phels turned to Farr.

“I’ve seen faked prints before, but never any this good. How’d you do it?”

These scientific birds are funny. Here was Farr looking a nice, long stretch in the face as “accessory after the fact,” and yet he brightened up under the admiration in Phel’s tone and answered with a voice that was chock-full of pride.

“It’s simple! I got hold of a man whose prints I knew weren’t in any police gallery—I didn’t want any slip up there—and took his prints and put them on a copper plate, using the ordinary photo-engraving process, but etching it pretty deep. Then I coated Clane’s fingers with gelatin—just enough to cover all his markings—and pressed them against the plates. That way I got everything, even to the pores, and …”

When I left the bureau ten minutes later Farr and Phels were still sitting knee to knee, jabbering away at each other as only a couple of birds who are cuckoo on the same subject can.

Black Mask, 15 October 1923

From the Author of “Slippery Fingers”

Since writing ‘Slippery Fingers’ I have read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle wherein August Vollmer, chief of police of Berkeley, California, and president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, is quoted as saying that although it is possible successfully to transfer actual finger-prints from one place to another it is not possible to forge them—‘Close inspection of any forged finger-print will soon cause detection.’

It may be that what Farr does in my story would be considered by Mr. Vollmer a transference rather than a forgery. But whichever it is, I think there is no longer reasonable room for doubt that finger-prints can be successfully forged. I have seen forged prints that to me seemed perfect, but not being even an amateur in that line, my opinion isn’t worth much. I think, however, that quite a number of those qualified to speak on the subject will agree with me that it can be, and has been, done.

In the second Arbuckle trial, if my memory is correct, the defense introduced an expert from Los Angeles who testified that he had deceived an assembly of his colleagues with forged prints.

The method used in my story was not selected because it was the best, but because it was the simplest with which I was acquainted and the most easily described. Successful experiments were made with it by the experts at the Leavenworth federal prison.

Sincerely,

S. D. Hammett

About the Author

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) charted a gritty new direction for American crime fiction, crafting true-to-life stories as brash as they are exacting. In 1922, he began writing fiction based on his experience as a private detective, and he pioneered the tough-minded, action-heavy, realistic style that became known as hardboiled. Among his best-known works are Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), The Thin Man (1934), and the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, most of which were published in Black Mask magazine.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Foreword” Copyright © 2016 by Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “Arson Plus,” “Slippery Fingers,” and “Crooked Souls” (“Gatewood Caper”) Copyright © 1923 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Foreword: “Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

Introduction: The Early Years, 1923–1924

Arson Plus

Crooked Souls

Slippery Fingers

About the Author

Copyright